The SITAI project for the industrial areas of Sardinia: from a GIS database to a web-based site selection tool

Abstract

SITAI, Sistema Informativo Territoriale delle Aree Industriali della Sardegna (Geographic Information System for the Industrial Areas of Sardinia) is a product which is being developed in Sardinia by Osservatorio Industriale della Sardegna with the support of CRS4. The system has been conceived with three main aims. The first is to conduct economic studies related to site and resource optimization, through analysis of the firms, facilities and infrastructure available in the Sardinian region and within each industrial area. The second is to promote Sardinia's industrial parks and to offer a site selection tool to potential investors, providing an integrated and harmonized view of the various industrial sites by means of a web-based interface to the data. Finally, the system is being proposed as a common starting point for the implementation of facility management applications within the industrial parks. The core of the SITAI database is represented by a set of geographic layers for each of the 23 currently active parks, linked to detailed information on the available infrastructure, the existing utilities, the characteristics of the firms located in the area, and on the costs for siting a new activity. This information is complemented by a regional-level view of the transportation networks and administrative boundaries, allowing to perform complex analyses on the available information. The project is now in its fourth year of life. After a prototype phase conducted in 1996-1997 on a single industrial park, the complete "desktop" version of the system has been implemented in 1998, and is currently being used by Osservatorio Industriale to provide, jointly with its other databases concerning the regional economy, a support to local policy makers, private companies, and consultants. During the past year, in addition to the development of the web-based interface to the database (released in May 2000) and the update of the database, one of the key issues faced has concerned the technology transfer towards the various actors involved in the project, either as data providers (i.e. the managers and the technicians of the parks), or as users (i.e. Osservatorio Industriale in their role as socio-economic analysts), in terms both of awareness raising on the potential of GIS-enabled applications and of training on the use of the system. The presentation will describe the features of the system, discuss some of the issues which have emerged as critical during the project, and present its possible further developments. In particular, we will focus on the site selection functionality offered by the web-based interface.