Appraisal of Quarries Excavation with ArcGIS Tools Using Historical Maps

The aim of the research is to set-up, experiment and test a procedure for assessing, through ESRI’s ArcGIS®, the volume of excavations in a quarry. In this research, the surface is useful for the deployment over time of the quarry, while the volume is useful to assess the quantity of the extracted material over time as well as for comparing it with the excavation data already hold by the administrations. The researchers are aware that new technologies offer precise and reliable tools for new situations [1–5], but for the activities that refer to the past it is necessary to use historical maps [6–10]. Now, finding historical relevant maps is difficult and the map content are not machine-readable and often data are non-useful. Luckily in this case, historical map about 1954, that was necessary to use, contained all necessary data. To make the data contained in the historical map useful, it was necessary to do manual work. So, the two maps that was necessary, one about 1954 and the other about 2005 adopted for the research, contained all necessary data. The adopted technical geoprocessing tools are part of Esri's ArcGIS. TIN’s modeling is very useful for the aim of the research. The application methods of these tools have been described in detail.