La comunicazione della cooperazione allo sviluppo: gli Enti Pubblici. Analisi discorsive dei Siti Web

Our research takes place in the context of a discipline kwown as Communication for Development, sited inside the field of Communication for Social Change, characterized by the use of interpersonal ad mass communication theories and tools, applyied to international development cooperation. Our study aims at pointing out a change of paradigm in this field: our object is Public Administration’s communication, therefore, what we suggest is a shift from Communication for Development, to Development Communication. The object of our study, hence, becomes the discourse itself, in its double action of representation and construction of reality. In particular, we are interested in the discourse’s tribute to the creation of a collective immagination, wich is the perspective towards which we have oriented the analysis, through a structuralist semoitics-based methodology integrated with a socio-semiotic approach. Taking into consideartion the fact that in our contemporary society (that is to say a ‘Western’ and ‘First World’ society), the internet is a crucial public space for the mediation and the management of collective immagination, we chose the web sites of Public Bodies which are dedicated to International Cooperation has our analysis corpus. This, due to their symbolic and ideologic significance, as well as for the actual political responsibility we think these web sites should have. The result of our analysis allows us to suggest some discoursive strategies used in the web sites of Public Bodies. In these sites, there is a tendency to shift the discourses around international cooperation from the ideological axis - avoiding in so doing to explicit a political statement about the causes of injustices and un-balances which lead to the necessity of a support in development (i.e. avoiding to mention values such as social justice and democracy while acknowledging socio-economical institutions which contribute to foster underdevelopment on a global scale) -, to the ethical axis, hence referring to moral values concerning the private sphere (human solidarity and charity), which is delegated mainly to non governamental associations.

La città di Bologna e la sua storia: diffusione e condivisione delle conoscenze attraverso Webgis open source e Web Mapping

To understand a city and its urban structure it is necessary to study its history. This is feasible through GIS (Geographical Information Systems) and its by-products on the web. Starting from a cartographic view they allow an initial understanding of, and a comparison between, present and past data together with an easy and intuitive access to database information. The research done led to the creation of a GIS for the city of Bologna. It is based on varied data such as historical map, vector and alphanumeric historical data, etc.. After providing information about GIS we thought of spreading and sharing the collected data on the Web after studying two solutions available on the market: Web Mapping and WebGIS. In this study we discuss the stages, beginning with the development of Historical GIS of Bologna, which led to the making of a WebGIS Open Source (MapServer and Chameleon) and the Web Mapping services (Google Earth, Google Maps and OpenLayers).

A Web GIS Decision Support System For Coastal Risk Assessment and Mitigation Planning

Coastal flooding poses serious threats to coastal areas around the world, billions of dollars in damage to property and infrastructure, and threatens the lives of millions of people. Therefore, disaster management and risk assessment aims at detecting vulnerability and capacities in order to reduce coastal flood disaster risk. In particular, non-specialized researchers, emergency management personnel, and land use planners require an accurate, inexpensive method to determine and map risk associated with storm surge events and long-term sea level rise associated with climate change. This study contributes to the spatially evaluation and mapping of social-economic-environmental vulnerability and risk at sub-national scale through the development of appropriate tools and methods successfully embedded in a Web-GIS Decision Support System. A new set of raster-based models were studied and developed in order to be easily implemented in the Web-GIS framework with the purpose to quickly assess and map flood hazards characteristics, damage and vulnerability in a Multi-criteria approach. The Web-GIS DSS is developed recurring to open source software and programming language and its main peculiarity is to be available and usable by coastal managers and land use planners without requiring high scientific background in hydraulic engineering. The effectiveness of the system in the coastal risk assessment is evaluated trough its application to a real case study.