The efficient management of Park resources: Natural and cultural data in the Alpi Marittime Park area

Abstract

Natural and cultural resource management has been widely promoted in recent years as an approach for pursuing biological conservation, cultural development and socioeconomic objectives. Parks are natural providers of such resources, due to the activities of periodical observations of species in their territory and of inventories of cultural heritage within its boundaries. However, the management and the exploitation of natural and cultural resources is often critical, due to the difficulty of collecting data in a standard and interoperable form and integrating it with other available information. This paper presents an approach to address the issue of natural and cultural data management to solve the problems of data heterogeneity, standard consistency and lack of a common data repository. In this paper, we firstly define a model to represent natural and cultural data according to specific international standards, and then we show how the resources of the Alpi Marittime Natural Park can be mapped onto it through the model. Finally, we report how we implemented and used the model in a real application in order to demonstrate the potential of our approach.