Two public archives nobody had ever put together.
On one side, the register of every school building in Italy. On the other, satellite measurements of how much the ground is moving, everywhere, for years. ORSS started from a simple question: what if we read them together?
📍 8 regions covered (Abruzzo, Molise, Marche, Umbria, Emilia-Romagna, Puglia, Toscana and Lazio) — the stated goal is full national coverage.
The idea
Italy publishes, free and in open format, the register of every public school building (Ministry of Education) and — thanks to the European Copernicus programme — millimetre-accurate satellite measurements of ground motion, updated across the whole continent (EGMS, European Ground Motion Service). Two enormous, public, free archives. Before this project, there was no simple way to cross-reference them and ask: is the ground under this school moving? By how much? Should it be checked before another one?
No new satellite sensors need to be built. What's needed is simply someone to connect the dots — which is exactly what this project does.
ORSS (Osservatorio sul Rischio Strutturale Scolastico — School Structural Risk Observatory) does exactly that: it takes every school's official address, turns it into a precise position on a map, and compares it against the nearest satellite measurement points. The result is a preliminary priority index — not a structural diagnosis, not a judgement on a building's safety (an assessment that is not this tool's role or authority to give), but an informed starting point for deciding where to look first.
Two objectives, not one: today's and tomorrow's
A first priority ordering, open and transparent
Thoroughly assessing a school building stock this large and spread across the territory requires specialist expertise, site visits, time and resources. ORSS does not replace that work: it tests whether Earth Observation data can help identify where it may be worth looking first.
Today 14,164 schools across 5 regions are included in the platform and linked to a preliminary priority index, freely accessible with no registration required. Sources, criteria, methodology and limitations are all documented publicly.
Among its sources, ORSS uses ground motion data from the Copernicus European Ground Motion Service (EGMS) and relates it to open data on school buildings.
The resulting index does not measure a school's structural safety and does not replace geological, geotechnical or structural investigations on site. It is a preliminary layer of territorial screening whose actual usefulness still needs to be validated.
From an independent project to a validated, progressively national methodology
ORSS's development follows three directions.
National coverage. Today the platform covers 5 of Italy's 20 regions. The architecture was designed to allow territorial coverage to be extended progressively.
Methodology validation. The main priority isn't only adding new territories, but verifying how genuinely useful the ORSS index is. That will require comparison with independent data, case studies, specialist assessments, and contributions from geologists, geotechnical and structural engineers, and Earth Observation experts. Sensitivity, uncertainty, and the criteria for associating buildings with EGMS points will also need to be analysed.
Data updates. The platform is designed to recalculate its indicators whenever new EGMS releases and new territorial data become available.
The end goal isn't to replace the professional, but to test whether ORSS can become a preliminary tool supporting prioritisation — useful to whoever has to decide where to focus attention and technical follow-up first.
You don't have to take my word for it
Everything shown here can be reconstructed from public data: no proprietary sensors, no measurement collected privately. The value added is in the integration method — the official school register has no coordinates, EGMS doesn't know where schools are: someone had to connect the two, and verify that the connection was correct.
How this is actually verified:
- ✓
No single blind source. Every address goes through a cascade of methods (real building on OpenStreetMap, name search, text address, then Google Geocoding as a targeted fallback) — full step-by-step detail in the guide.
- ✓
Independent geographic check. Every automatic placement is checked against the real administrative municipal boundaries (not against itself, which would be circular) before being accepted.
- ✓
Declared precision, never hidden. Every school's page states the method used to place it: "approximate street" is never passed off as "exact building".
- ✓
Automatic updates. When EGMS publishes a new release, the score recalculates itself — no manual step, no data silently going stale.
- ✓
Independent indicators, never merged into one number. A municipality's seismic zone is shown next to the EGMS score, not summed into it: weighting different phenomena (millimetres of ground motion, a seismic category) into a single index is a decision for a structural engineer, not for this tool.
Who's behind it
An independent project, built by a single person — not a company, not an institution, not a team — born from a simple observation more than a desk plan.
ORSS started from a simple observation: the public data useful for supporting prevention and identifying where a closer look may be worthwhile already exists, is free, and almost always goes unused because nobody connects it together. ORSS exists to fill exactly that gap — a real tool, built on public data, meant to grow and be useful to whoever actually has to decide where to check first.
How it came to be, step by step
The Pescara pilot
Starting with pre-school and primary schools in a single municipality, to validate the idea: do MIUR addresses really turn into precise positions? Does EGMS data really cross-reference usefully?
Every state school, precision geocoding
Extended to every school level, with serious work on precision: from a generic address to the real school building, cross-referencing OpenStreetMap and multiple sources to reduce errors.
The geoportal
From a list to a tool: a satellite map, a page for every school with historical ground motion charts, a guide written for non-specialists.
The whole Abruzzo region
From the single pilot municipality to the whole region: 1,061 buildings across 232 municipalities, with the architecture already built to grow beyond it.
Molise, second region
The method works outside Abruzzo too, with no changes to the architecture: 293 buildings, same pipeline, same precision. No longer a one-off success.
Marche, third region
Borders Abruzzo, touches the Apennine area of the 2016-2017 seismic sequence: 1,253 buildings, 100% geocoded from the official MIUR source with no fallback needed. Third region, same architecture, no changes.
Umbria, fourth region
Borders both Abruzzo and Marche, at the heart of the same 2016-2017 seismic sequence (Norcia, Cascia): 806 buildings, 100% geocoded from the official MIUR source. Fourth region, same architecture, no changes.
Emilia-Romagna, fifth region
The first time beyond the original 4 contiguous regions: 2,567 buildings, 100% geocoded from the official MIUR source, and the first case where the covered area required splitting the EGMS satellite data fetch into two groups instead of one. Fifth region, same underlying architecture.
Puglia, sixth region
The first region not bordering the area already covered (it only touches Molise): 2,418 buildings, 100% geocoded from the official MIUR source, second separate satellite fetch after Emilia-Romagna. Sixth region, same underlying architecture.
Toscana, seventh region
Borders Emilia-Romagna, Marche and Umbria, closing central Italy towards the Tyrrhenian coast: 2,581 buildings, 100% geocoded from the official MIUR source. Seventh region, same underlying architecture.
Lazio, eighth region
Borders Toscana, Umbria, Marche, Abruzzo and Molise: 3,185 buildings, 99% geocoded from the official MIUR source. The first region with a large metropolitan area (Rome) — same underlying architecture, no changes.
Towards national coverage
Eight regions demonstrate that the method scales. The next step is adding more Italian regions, one at a time, until the whole country is covered.
Principles
Public data only
No proprietary sensors, no closed data: everything shown here comes from public, verifiable, linked sources.
Preliminary priority, not a diagnosis
This tool doesn't replace a structural engineer, and doesn't make judgements that aren't its to make: it only helps decide who to send one to first.
Understandable by everyone
If a piece of data can't be explained in plain language, it isn't shown without context.
Want to know more?
A page dedicated to institutions evaluating the project or interested in collaborating (Italian only).
or read the full guide on how it works