Il Piano di gestione del sito Unesco e Le linee guida per il progetto dello spazio pubblico di Mantova e Sabbioneta

La candidatura per l’iscrizione alla lista del Patrimonio mondiale dell’umanità dell’Unesco ha svolto un ruolo determinante nel dispiegarsi di politiche urbane volte alla tutela e alla conservazione attiva dei valori del patrimonio urbano storico delle città di Mantova e Sabbioneta. Tale candidatura la si può considerare come un momento catalizzatore di una consapevolezza diffusa sull’argomento già matura ed esplicitatasi con la stessa decisione strategica di proporla nel 2008 all’Unesco. Questa operazione, di fatto, rende irreversibile l’attenzione pubblica e la porta sul piano dell’azione concreta sia con l’elaborazione del Piano di gestione del sito candidato, sia con la redazione di alcuni progetti a supporto della candidatura stessa: il progetto del “Parco culturale dei laghi di Mantova” del 2010, il “Progetto di valorizzazione dell’ambito urbano delle mura di Sabbioneta”, entrambi del 2008-2009. Le successive “Linee guida per il progetto dello spazio pubblico di Mantova e Sabbioneta”, in quanto parte integrante delle azioni previste dal Piano di gestione, completano, al momento, il quadro dell’iniziativa pubblica dispiegatasi negli ultimi nove/dieci anni nel campo della tutela del patrimonio urbano storico e la proiettano nel futuro fornendole un quadro di riferimento definito.The candidacy for the registration to the World Heritage list of Unesco has played a decisive role in the unfolding of urban policies aimed at the protection and conservation activates the values of urban heritage of the city of Mantua and Sabbioneta. This application may be considered as a catalyst of a widespread awareness on the subject already mature and made explicit by the same strategic decision to propose in 2008 to Unesco. This operation in fact makes irreversible public attention and brings it on the level of the concrete action with both the preparation of the Piano di gestione of the site candidate, both with projects to support the candidacy itself: the project of the "Cultural park of the lakes of Mantova" of 2010, the "project of enhancement of the urban context of the city walls of Sabbioneta", both of 2008-2009. The subsequent "Guidelines for the project of public space of Mantua and Sabbioneta", as an integral part of the actions provided for in the Piano di gestione, complete, at the moment, the framework of public initiative of the last nine or ten years in the field of the protection of the urban heritage and project it into the future by providing it with a reference framework define

Il Piano di gestione del sito Unesco e Le linee guida per il progetto dello spazio pubblico di Mantova e Sabbioneta

La candidatura per l’iscrizione alla lista del Patrimonio mondiale dell’umanità dell’Unesco ha svolto un ruolo determinante nel dispiegarsi di politiche urbane volte alla tutela e alla conservazione attiva dei valori del patrimonio urbano storico delle città di Mantova e Sabbioneta. Tale candidatura la si può considerare come un momento catalizzatore di una consapevolezza diffusa sull’argomento già matura ed esplicitatasi con la stessa decisione strategica di proporla nel 2008 all’Unesco. Questa operazione, di fatto, rende irreversibile l’attenzione pubblica e la porta sul piano dell’azione concreta sia con l’elaborazione del Piano di gestione del sito candidato, sia con la redazione di alcuni progetti a supporto della candidatura stessa: il progetto del “Parco culturale dei laghi di Mantova” del 2010, il “Progetto di valorizzazione dell’ambito urbano delle mura di Sabbioneta”, entrambi del 2008-2009. Le successive “Linee guida per il progetto dello spazio pubblico di Mantova e Sabbioneta”, in quanto parte integrante delle azioni previste dal Piano di gestione, completano, al momento, il quadro dell’iniziativa pubblica dispiegatasi negli ultimi nove/dieci anni nel campo della tutela del patrimonio urbano storico e la proiettano nel futuro fornendole un quadro di riferimento definito.The candidacy for the registration to the World Heritage list of Unesco has played a decisive role in the unfolding of urban policies aimed at the protection and conservation activates the values of urban heritage of the city of Mantua and Sabbioneta. This application may be considered as a catalyst of a widespread awareness on the subject already mature and made explicit by the same strategic decision to propose in 2008 to Unesco. This operation in fact makes irreversible public attention and brings it on the level of the concrete action with both the preparation of the Piano di gestione of the site candidate, both with projects to support the candidacy itself: the project of the "Cultural park of the lakes of Mantova" of 2010, the "project of enhancement of the urban context of the city walls of Sabbioneta", both of 2008-2009. The subsequent "Guidelines for the project of public space of Mantua and Sabbioneta", as an integral part of the actions provided for in the Piano di gestione, complete, at the moment, the framework of public initiative of the last nine or ten years in the field of the protection of the urban heritage and project it into the future by providing it with a reference framework define

La Demarche ÈcoCitè in Francia: incentivare, sostenere, accompagnare

Sulla scia dei bandi competitivi Eco quartier della fine degli anni Novanta e primi anni Duemila pensati per premiare le migliori esperienze di nuovi quartieri basati sui principi della sostenibilità e del risparmio energetico, lo Stato francese, a partire dal 2010, ha avviato il Programme d’investissement d’Avenir (Pia.) Ville de demain per finanziare l’ideazione, realizzazione e gestione di progetti innovativi nella concezione urbana, nelle scelte per la mobilità, nella gestione delle risorse, nella valorizzazione energetica. L’ente finanziatore è la Caisse des Dèpots che si appoggia al Programme Ville de demain per sostenere progetti urbani integrati, portati avanti da attori pubblici o privati, con l’obiettivo di realizzare città attrattive e resilienti, capaci di tutelare l’ambiente, favorire la coesione sociale e la qualità della vita dei loro abitanti. I finanziamenti, per complessivi 668 milioni di euro, sono stati suddivisi in due tranches, la prima relativa al periodo 2010 – 2014 ha premiato i progetti di 19 città selezionati per il carattere innovativo sul piano ecologico delle loro azioni; la seconda 2015 – 2020, intervenuta dopo l’approvazione della Legge n. 2014-58 del 27 gennaio 2014 di modernizzazione dell’azione pubblica territoriale e di affermazione delle metropoli, ha visto raggiungere la cifra di 31, tra città e collettività territoriali con oltre 100.000 abitanti, che hanno beneficiato dei finanziamenti.In the wake of invitations competitive Eco quartier in the late nineties and early years two thousand designed to reward the best experiences of new districts based on the principles of sustainability and energy saving, the French State since 2010, has launched the Programme d'Investissement d'Avenir (P.I.A.) Ville de demain to finance the design, implementation and management of innovative projects in urban conception, in the choices for mobility, in the management of resources in the energy valorisation. The funding agency is the Caisse des Dèpots which rests at the Programme Ville de demain to support urban projects integrated, carried out by public or private actors, with the goal of makin

Strategia, cooperazione, apertura europea nell’azione pubblica della città di Lecce

Le ragioni dell’interesse del caso leccese attengono ad aspetti diversi tra loro strettamente correlati, anzi è proprio essere riusciti a mettere in atto questa correlazione di elementi a costituire uno dei dati più significativi. Il primo dei quali è costituito dalla convinta adesione ad un approccio di tipo strategico nell’indirizzare le scelte volte a garantire uno sviluppo equilibrato della città e del territorio e a governarne le trasformazioni. Nell’ambito di questo approccio spicca la volontà dell’attore pubblico di confrontarsi con partners diversi, anche agendo da catalizzatore per favorire la costruzione di relazioni ai vari livelli. Tra le diverse relazioni emerge quella con l’Università del Salento a cui viene attribuito un ruolo chiave in tutta l’impalcatura strategica. Ma il sostegno su cui poggia l’azione pubblica è data da una forte apertura europea in termini di attenzione agli orientamenti, alle politiche e ai programmi che vengono definiti a livello comunitario. Partenariati e sguardo europeo uniti ad un’elaborazione progettuale piuttosto articolata rappresentano la nervatura dell’attività tesa ad intercettare risorse sfruttando le diverse opportunità che di volta in volta si presentano e che hanno permesso la realizzazione di numerosi interventi.The reasons for the interest of the case of Lecce adhere to different aspects between their closely related, in fact it is precisely to be able to implement this correlation of elements to constitute one of the most meaningful data. The first of which is constituted by convinced adherence to an approach of a strategic nature in directing the choices aimed at ensuring a balanced development of the city and the territory and to control the transformations. Within the scope of this approach stands out the will of the public actor confronted with different partners, also acting as a catalyst to encourage the building of relations at various levels. Between the various reports there stands out the one with the University of Salento, which is given a key role throughout the strategic scaffold. But the support on which rests the public action is given by a strong European opening in terms of attention to the guidelines, policies and programs that are defined at Community level. Partnerships and European gaze joined to an elaborate project rather articulated represent the rib of the activities intended to intercept resources by exploiting the different opportunities that from time to time you have and that have allowed the realization of numerous interventions

An integrated IaaS and PaaS architecture for scientific computing

Trabajo presentado al EGI Community Forum, celebrado en Bari (Italia) del 10 al 13 de noviembre de 2015.Scientific applications often require multiple computing resources deployed on a coordinated way. The deployment of multiple resources require installing and configuring special software applications which should be updated when changes in the virtual infrastructure take place. When working on hybrid and federated cloud environments, restrictions on the hypervisor or cloud management platform must be minimised to facilitate geographic-wide brokering and cross-site deployments. Moreover, preserving the individual operation at the site-level in federated clouds is also important for scalability and interoperability. In that sense, the INDIGO-DataCloud project [1] has been designed with the objective of building up a PaaS-level cloud solution for research. One of the key multi-level components is the PaaS computing core. This part constitutes the kernel for the deployment of services and computing virtual infrastructures for the users. It is complemented with the virtualized storage, federated AAI and networking. The INDIGO-DataCloud PaaS core will be based on a microservice architecture [2]. Microservices consist of a set of narrowly focused, independently deployable services, typically implemented using container-embedded applications, exposed by RESTful interface. Microservices are designed to be highly scalable, highly available and targeted for the use in cloud environments. INDIGO's microservices will be deployed, dynamically scheduled and managed using tools such as kubernetes [3]. In cases where multi-tenancy is not yet intrinsically supported by the particular microservice, like the container manager, INDIGO-DataCloud may decide to offer multiple instances to bridge that gap. INDIGO PaaS will offer an upper layer orchestration service for distributed applications using the TOSCA language standard [4]. It will deal with the requested service instantiation and application execution, managing the needed microservices in order, for example, to select the right end-point for the deployment. Cross-site deployments will also be possible. This PaaS, aimed at providing a more efficient platform for scientific computing, will require additional characteristics from the underlying layers. The INDIGO PaaS will leverage an enhanced IaaS that will provide a richer set of features currently missing. The usage of TOSCA permits IaaS providers to offer infrastructure orchestration, making possible to manage the deployment and configuration of the resources that are being provided. The life-cycle of the resources is therefore managed through the APIs exposed by the IaaS end-points. The TOSCA templates will be translated into their native deployment schemas using IM [5] for OpenNebula and Heat-Translator [6] for OpenStack HEAT. Both OpenNebula and OpenStack will incorporate drivers to support the deployment of containers as first-class resources on the IaaS. This will provide high efficiency when building up complex configurations from a repository of container images. The scheduling algorithms for both cloud management frameworks will be improved, in order to provide a better experience for the end-users and a more efficient utilization of the computational resources. The usage of two-level orchestrator (at the level of PaaS and within each IaaS instances) will enhance the capabilities of providing a dynamic and on-demand increase in cloud resourcesPeer Reviewe

Gene analogue finder: a GRID solution for finding functionally analogous gene products

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>To date more than 2,1 million gene products from more than 100000 different species have been described specifying their function, the processes they are involved in and their cellular localization using a very well defined and structured vocabulary, the gene ontology (GO). Such vast, well defined knowledge opens the possibility of compare gene products at the level of functionality, finding gene products which have a similar function or are involved in similar biological processes without relying on the conventional sequence similarity approach. Comparisons within such a large space of knowledge are highly data and computing intensive. For this reason this project was based upon the use of the computational GRID, a technology offering large computing and storage resources.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>We have developed a tool, G<b>EN</b>e Analo<b>G</b>ue F<b>IN</b>d<b>E</b>r (ENGINE) that parallelizes the search process and distributes the calculation and data over the computational GRID, splitting the process into many sub-processes and joining the calculation and the data on the same machine and therefore completing the whole search in about 3 days instead of occupying one single machine for more than 5 CPU years. The results of the functional comparison contain potential functional analogues for more than 79000 gene products from the most important species. 46% of the analyzed gene products are well enough described for such an analysis to individuate functional analogues, such as well-known members of the same gene family, or gene products with similar functions which would never have been associated by standard methods.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>ENGINE has produced a list of potential functionally analogous relations between gene products within and between species using, in place of the sequence, the gene description of the GO, thus demonstrating the potential of the GO. However, the current limiting factor is the quality of the associations of many gene products from non-model organisms that often have electronic associations, since experimental information is missing. With future improvements of the GO, this limit will be reduced. ENGINE will manifest its power when it is applied to the whole GODB of more than 2,1 million gene products from more than 100000 organisms. The data produced by this search is planed to be available as a supplement to the GO database as soon as we are able to provide regular updates.</p

Testing of several distributed file-systems (HDFS, Ceph and GlusterFS) for supporting the HEP experiments analysis

The activity of testing new storage solution is of great importance in order to provide both features and performance evaluation and give few hints to small-medium sites that are interested in exploiting new storage technologies. In particular this work will cover storage solutions that provide both standard POSIX storage access and cloud technologies; we focused our attention and our test on HDFS, Ceph, and GlusterFS

Patrimonio e rigenerazione urbana a Madrid (Spagna): La tabacalera e Madrid Rio

Cultural heritage is a dinamic concept, enriched over time through continous reflections and by different per spectives. In recent decades, the need to move beyond traditional constraining instruments in favour of more operational strategies is experimented. This has led to an evolution from historicist postulates, and of exclusive conservation, to a broader approach in which the relevance of the built asset is measured, beyond its historical and architectural value, by its capacity to regenerate a territory with a social impact. The Madrid Rio and Tabacalera cases are examples of these parameters

Genome-wide identification of coding and non-coding conserved sequence tags in human and mouse genomes

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>The accurate detection of genes and the identification of functional regions is still an open issue in the annotation of genomic sequences. This problem affects new genomes but also those of very well studied organisms such as human and mouse where, despite the great efforts, the inventory of genes and regulatory regions is far from complete. Comparative genomics is an effective approach to address this problem. Unfortunately it is limited by the computational requirements needed to perform genome-wide comparisons and by the problem of discriminating between conserved coding and non-coding sequences. This discrimination is often based (thus dependent) on the availability of annotated proteins.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>In this paper we present the results of a comprehensive comparison of human and mouse genomes performed with a new high throughput grid-based system which allows the rapid detection of conserved sequences and accurate assessment of their coding potential. By detecting clusters of coding conserved sequences the system is also suitable to accurately identify potential gene loci.</p> <p>Following this analysis we created a collection of human-mouse conserved sequence tags and carefully compared our results to reliable annotations in order to benchmark the reliability of our classifications. Strikingly we were able to detect several potential gene loci supported by EST sequences but not corresponding to as yet annotated genes.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>Here we present a new system which allows comprehensive comparison of genomes to detect conserved coding and non-coding sequences and the identification of potential gene loci. Our system does not require the availability of any annotated sequence thus is suitable for the analysis of new or poorly annotated genomes.</p

The GENIUS Grid Portal and robot certificates: a new tool for e-Science

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Grid technology is the computing model which allows users to share a wide <it>pletora </it>of distributed computational resources regardless of their geographical location. Up to now, the high security policy requested in order to access distributed computing resources has been a rather big limiting factor when trying to broaden the usage of Grids into a wide community of users. Grid security is indeed based on the Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) of X.509 certificates and the procedure to get and manage those certificates is unfortunately not straightforward. A first step to make Grids more appealing for new users has recently been achieved with the adoption of robot certificates.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>Robot certificates have recently been introduced to perform automated tasks on Grids on behalf of users. They are extremely useful for instance to automate grid service monitoring, data processing production, distributed data collection systems. Basically these certificates can be used to identify a person responsible for an unattended service or process acting as client and/or server. Robot certificates can be installed on a smart card and used behind a portal by everyone interested in running the related applications in a Grid environment using a user-friendly graphic interface. In this work, the GENIUS Grid Portal, powered by EnginFrame, has been extended in order to support the new authentication based on the adoption of these robot certificates.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>The work carried out and reported in this manuscript is particularly relevant for all users who are not familiar with personal digital certificates and the technical aspects of the Grid Security Infrastructure (GSI). The valuable benefits introduced by robot certificates in e-Science can so be extended to users belonging to several scientific domains, providing an asset in raising Grid awareness to a wide number of potential users.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>The adoption of Grid portals extended with robot certificates, can really contribute to creating transparent access to computational resources of Grid Infrastructures, enhancing the spread of this new paradigm in researchers' working life to address new global scientific challenges. The evaluated solution can of course be extended to other portals, applications and scientific communities.</p