Religious heritage in Italy: websites and geolocalization. A new appraisal

Nowadays the creation, storage, accessibility, and interoperability of data on the internet are more and more pervasive. Many different kinds of databases and/or geo-databases are published on the internet, along with other forms of information that deal with various topics (e.g. science, medicine, transport and tourism), based on different architectures. These websites can be private or public, and with or without free access. However, the reflection is ongoing on these data (Capineri, 2015). A significantly-sized database is that of the Italian Catholic Church. It concerns an inventory of its movable or immovable property throughout the entire Italian territory. Anyone could be interested in accessing this kind of information (e.g. institutions and individuals). This contribution intends to deal with geographical information focusing on the religious sites in a period in which religious tourism is considered a significant asset for the tourism industry, for regional/ local development, and more (Rizzo L.S., 2016). Databases about religious heritage are investigated in order to understand how they link religious data (e.g. churches, monasteries, sites of pilgrimage, sanctuaries) with geographical and spatial information. Religious subdivisions are different from secular ones: in Italy, for example, dioceses have different boundaries than the Italian provinces, and ecclesiastical regions sometimes differ from administrative regions. In the era of “big data” how are religious heritage and routes created and represented? What is the level of usability by the website users? How can they interact with such websites? Is creating itineraries to reach POIs easy? Is linkng various POIs feasable?