ABSTRACT
The study of "Towns, polycentric development and urban-rural relations" has been placed among the priority 1 measures in the ESPON 2006 Program of the European Community. This indicates the relevance of developing research work towards, on the one hand, better understanding and interpreting the evolution of urban organisation and growth and, on the other hand, towards investigating the relations between natural or agricultural land uses and urbanised areas. For this purpose it is necessary to select and implement innovative tools able to handle the huge amount of available data concerning territorial systems (statistical, economic, cartographic data and so on) in order to extract useful information from them.
