Database design and gis application in brownfields management: the case of Torviscosa site,Iitaly.

This study concern the preparation of a spatial database serviceable to the management of brownfields remediation, particularly for planning of activities, collection of subsurface data and for detailing the site conditions to a technical consulting and administrative authority. The study site, owned by Caffaro SpA, is located in Torviscosa (Udine, Italy); the industrial plants of Torviscosa have been established by the company SNIA in 1938. The large extension, importance and complexity of the site demanded a set of tools to analyse geographical data coming from various sources, in an efficient way. The database includes auxiliary data coming from geotechnical and field tests performed during the investigation phase, in order to define a detailed soil profile of the site. The GIS system used to manage the data is ARCGIS™ by ESRI™ with the extension required for geostatistical, vector and raster analyses. The designed geodatabase (in Microsoft™ Access format) contains different feature classes and tables relative to the modelled entities. All the system has been conceived and designed in order to have a reliable, comprehensive and user friendly tool to manage all the assessment, characterisation, decommissioning and clean-up operations of a huge industrial area, and to allow the full control and information exchange at any time of a presumably long duration project. Keywords: GIS, database, DBMS, archive, brownfields, Arcgis™, Oracle™.