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This paper describes the results achieved within the framework of the national research project Reduction of the Seismic Vulnerability of Infrastructural Systems and Physical Environment, sponsored by the GNDT (Italian National Group for Defense Against Earthquakes), which is a body of the INGV (Italian Geophysic and Volcanology National Institute). The project, which involved several Universities around Italy under the coordination of Prof. Michele Calvi of the University of Pavia, was carried out over three years and has been just completed in July 2004. The aim of the project was to study the problems related to the seismic vulnerability assessment both of the physical environment and the infrastructural systems, to develop new techniques and tools, or improve the existing ones, to provide an efficient reduction of the risk. One of the products of the project is the Web GIS, described in this paper, which has been applied to a test area in the South of Italy which in the past has suffered high seismic level events, to prove its efficiency and to examine the possibility of its implementation at national level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Risk assessment is a complex issue aiming at evaluation of different aspects of disaster damages. Traditionally, risk analysis relies on mathematical models to establish the likelihood of a given event occurring with a given degree of intensity in a given site. The major limitation of this type of approach is the fact that the field of risk necessarily entails uncertainty and it is not therefore always possible to make realistic hypotheses about possible future scenarios. Therefore, a new approach is required, that can take into account social, economic, cultural, and political aspects that are not generally considered in traditional assessment methods, but that serve to define the capacity of response of a territorial system to a disaster. In this paper we present a new approach, according to which the assessment process breaks down the principal goals into a hierarchy of lower level sub-goals. Each element of the hierarchy is assigned a local weight that evaluates the importance of that element not in overall terms (i.e. referred to the principal goal), but only in relation to the supra-ordinate element with which it is compared. The approach is tested in a case study estimating the risk of flooding in the Municipality of Monopoli, Italy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]