128,471 research outputs found
Problems and contradictions in the constitution of a southern european metropolitan area: Catania
No full textThe Metropolitan Area of Catania has been created with a Regional law of 1986 (together with that of Palermo and Messina). With its 27 municipalities and for its characteristics it resembles, more than any other area in Sicily, a Metropolitan Area (MA), that is, a complex urban system in continuos evolution and at an advanced stage of the urban life cycle. However, it is still possible to trace some incongruous elements in the creation of such a system: a) the decentralisation process of function and activities, with respect to the main urban core, is at a very early stage; b) the main urban core still has difficulties to attract highly technological tertiary activities and strategic services which would allow a connection between the local, the national and the global level; c) the medium and small size centres have a low functional specialisation and are identified by highly hierarchical relationships; d) the MA has a weak cohesion in terms of economic and functional relations. The ambiguity of the relationships among the different centres, their low level of specialisation and the strong hierarchical dependency of the peripheral ones represent an obstacle to the creation of the Metropolitan Government of the area of Catania. This appears as a top down manoeuvre without solid territorial basis and with persistence of contradictory elements in the development and consolidation of the MA. This does not mean that a system to govern the MA would not be necessary to strengthen the evolution of Catania urban complex. This evolution has, in fact, known a clear intensification in the last ten years and has shown how urgent it is for this Government to realise socio-economic, infrastructural and cultural policies capable of accelerating the ongoing process. It is also essential for this Government to make its choices without incorporating automatically the power of local autonomies, but by reaching agreements on common issues.
Trade as a cultural identity aspect in a city. A case study on Catania
No full textIn the present-day post-industrial society and in a globalised economy there is a strong tendency towards standardization and homologation. If we consider one of the most traditional urban functions - the commercial one - analysing what is happening in the centre of the cities of all the developed countries of the world, we notice a process of standardization regarding the offer, both in the sense of the single articles sold and in the sense of the commercial area in all its complexity (uniformity of the showcases for the exposure, diminution of the historical shops with sale of distinctive articles, diffusion of the branches of national and international chains and the phenomenon of franchising). Therefore, the central areas of our cities tend to be more and more alike. Obviously this is fruit of a more complex process, that is concretized in the tendency towards the diversification of the distributive network through the rapid diffusion of hypermarkets and commercial centres in the outskirts of cities and in the changed behaviour of the consumers, more and more directed to American styles of consumption. What kind of role will the more traditional commercial structures that characterize the Italian historical centres have in the future? Despite the fact that these last ones are, at the moment, under considerable pressure that pushes towards a more radical change, there is the possibility however that the particular "commercial landscape" that characterizes them could itself become a new model of development capable of promoting the urban culture, close to the functionalistic model, currently in expansion, totally directed towards the peripheral spaces. Catania is a city where we find, to a great extent, the evolutionary characteristics of the southern urban system, but in which we find even more the changes and the tendencies present in the cities of the more developed regions when processes of decentralization of economic activities, residential activities and of the social structures are outlined. The commercial patrimony of Catania, besides the cultural one, represents one of the pivots on which the identity of the city is based. It represents a resource for the development of the town and a stimulation of tourism. This research investigates the solidity and the potentialities of traditional commerce in the central areas of the city of Catania in relation to the dynamics of development of the external commercial centres.
Papilio saharae subsp. aferpilaggi Cassar & Catania 2023, ssp. nov.
No full text<i>Papilio saharae aferpilaggi</i> ssp. nov. <p> <b>Holotype</b>. Adult male, collected 05 April 2022, <i>leg</i>. Aldo Catania and Louis F Cassar (Figure 5). The holotype will be deposited in the Museo Civico di Storia Naturale ‘ G. Doria’, Genoa, Italy.</p> <p> <b>Type locality</b>. Contrada di Cimitero Vecchio [35.51473, 12.56600], island of Lampedusa (Isola di Lampedusa),</p> <p>Sicily, Italy (Sicilia, Italia).</p>Published as part of <i>Cassar, Louis-F & Catania, Aldo, 2023, A new subspecies of Papilio saharae Oberthür, 1879 (Lepidoptera: Papilionidae) from Lampedusa, Italy, pp. 65-78 in Zootaxa 5231 (1)</i> on page 70, DOI: 10.11646/zootaxa.5231.1.5, <a href="http://zenodo.org/record/7571915">http://zenodo.org/record/7571915</a>
A case of Racial Discrimination: Azeglio Bemporad, astronomer poet
No full textA case of racial discrimination : Azeglio Bemporad, who worked at Catania Astrophysical Observatory until 1938, year of purge against Jews in Italy
Spatial data on the web: Issues and challenges
No full textSpatial data are today needed in a wide range of application domains. Indeed, spatial properties are included in several application contexts requiring the management of very large data sets, such as, for instance, computer-aided design (CAD), very large scale integration (VLSI), robotics, and image processing. However, the primary target of systems dealing with spatial data remains geographical applications, since they served as the first motivation for the development of such technology and still represent the most challenging application environment [19]. Spatial data can be defined as pieces of information describing quantitative and/or qualitative properties that refer to space. Such properties can be represented as attributes of a set of objects (like the path of a given highway or the technical drawing of the new version of a car engine) or as functions of the space locations (like the temperature measured at a given location on the European continent or the measured infrared emissions in a remote sensing image). © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007. All rights are reserved
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
No full textThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
A logical approach to cooperative information systems
No full text"Cooperative information system management" refers to the capacity of several computing systems to communicate and cooperate in order to acquire, store, manage, query data and knowledge. Current solutions to the problem of cooperative information management are still far from being satisfactory. In particular, they lack the ability to fully model cooperation among heterogeneous systems according to a declarative style. The use of a logical approach to model all aspects of cooperation seems very promising. In this paper, we define a logical language able to support cooperative queries, updates and update propagation. We model the sources of information as deductive databases, sharing the same logical language to express queries and updates, but containing independent, even if possibly related, data. We use the Obj-U-Datalog (E. Bertino, G. Guerrini, D. Montesi, Toward deductive object databases, Theory and Practice of Object Systems 1 (1) (1995) 19-39) language to model queries and transactions in each source of data. Such language is then extended to deal with active rules in the style of Active-U-Datalog (E. Bertino, B. Catania, V. Gervasi, A. Raffaeta, Active-U-Datalog: Integrating active rules in a logical update language, in: B. Freitag, H. Decker, M. Kifer, A. Voronkov (Eds.), LBCS 1472: Transactions and Change in Login Databases, 1998, pp. 106-132), interpreted according to the PARK semantics proposed in G. Gottlob, G. Moerkotte, V.S. Subrahmanian (The PARK semantics for active rules, in: P.M.G. Apers, M. Bouzeghoub, G. Gardarin (Eds.), LNCS 1057: Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Extending Database Technology, 1996, pp. 35-55). By using active rules, a system can efficiently perform update propagation among different databases. The result is a logical environment, integrating active and deductive rules, to perform update propagation in a cooperative framework. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights reserved
A Logical Approach to Cooperative Information Systems
No full text``Cooperative information system management'' refers to the capacity of several computing systems to communicate and cooperate in order to acquire, store, manage, query data and knowledge. Current solutions to the problem of cooperative information management are still far from being satisfactory. In particular, they lack the ability to fully model cooperation among heterogeneous systems according to a declarative style. The use of a logical approach to model all aspects of cooperation seems very promising. In this paper, we de®ne a logical language able to support cooperative queries, updates and update propagation. We model the sources of information as deductive databases, sharing the same logical language to ex- press queries and updates, but containing independent, even if possibly related, data. We use the Obj-U-Datalog (E. Bertino, G. Guerrini, D. Montesi, Toward deductive object data- bases, Theory and Practice of Object Systems 1 (1) (1995) 19±39) language to model queries and transactions in each source of data. Such language is then extended to deal with active rules in the style of Active-U-Datalog (E. Bertino, B. Catania, V. Gervasi, A. Ra aet a, Ac- tive-U-Datalog: Integrating active rules in a logical update language, in: B. Freitag, H. Decker, M. Kifer, A. Voronkov (Eds.), LBCS 1472: Transactions and Change in Login Databases, 1998, pp. 106±132), interpreted according to the PARK semantics proposed in G. Gottlob, G. Moerkotte, V.S. Subrahmanian (The PARK semantics for active rules, in: P.M.G. Apers, M. Bouzeghoub, G. Gardarin (Eds.), LNCS 1057: Proceedings of the Fifth International Con- ference on Extending Database Technology, 1996, pp. 35±55). By using active rules, a system can e ciently perform update propagation among di erent databases. The result is a logical environment, integrating active and deductive rules, to perform update propagation in a cooperative framework
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