Medieval municipal buildings: development of a digital atlas to support historical research

Digitizing of paper archives provides access to the necessary information from anywhere where it is possible to reach the Internet and to several users at the same time. Translation of documents into electronic form is done with their simultaneous systematization, structuring, and backup creation. After the translation of paper documents into digital form and creating search fields, they can be loaded into specialized systems - electronic archives. This approach provides several improvements: fast documents search, secure documents moving, protection against loss or damage to documents. Such an electronic archive is also the subject of this thesis. The proposed information system, named "Atlante dei palazzi comunali", serves to collect heterogeneous information on historical buildings that are the object of study and to provide researchers with a digital tool for the analysis and sharing of the collected material. In general, the platform structure can be divided into two parts: public site and private site. The public part of the portal is used to present the project and to allow the visitor to perform some predefined searches and view statistics on the collection of buildings or their characteristics. The private part has a multifunctional user interface, which includes management (insert/edit/view) forms of all platforms. Some of them can be dynamic, based on the selection of information to be inserted/displayed. The process of developing the application can be divided into three stages. In the first stage, the design of the future platform was carried out. Also, research was done on the available technologies that would allow the development of the application efficiently. Certainly, after this research, all the necessary tools and frameworks were selected: Docker as deployment environment, Django and Bootstrap as application development frameworks and MongoDB as Database Management System plus other small libraries and plugins. In the second phase, all the requirements within the platform were implemented most simply and efficiently. In particular, the collections from MongoDB were modeled, the templates and views from Django were developed and customized with the active use of Bootstrap components. Also, the Leaflet library was used intensively to implement an interactive map for positioning the investigated objects in space. Not least, it is worth to mention the containerization of all systems within the Docker. The last phase is the process of testing the application, where due to a series of test and use cases, several bugs and disparities with the initial requirements were determined, and later corrected. Considering all the advantages of the application and its possible improvements, we can conclude that the platform has a future not only in the academic environment but has the potential to become the leading tool for collecting and preserving data regarding cultural heritage.