128 The City of Havana was founded in the early 16th century. It treasures up a remarkable heritage of urban and architectural monuments located in its Historical Centre, which has an area of 2.1 square kilometres and a total of 3.500 buildings, the seventh part of which is considered to be of great historical value. The Historical Centre was declared a World Cultural Heritage site in 1982. The City Historian’s Office (CHO) was founded in 1938, as a pioneer institution in the transformation of heritage preservation and defence of the national identity. Over the last ten years, the CHO has developed and implemented a very novel management pattern. Human resources have been trained and an organizational structure with specific divisions and a managerial system have been created and consolidated. This structure was developed to conduct a process covering strategically integrated environmental planning – (including the economy-society-territory-habitat) – to the physical recovery of buildings and urban spaces. In this complex rehabilitation work, GIS applications play a key role as support in the decision-making process, in the development of public e-service applications and in the promotion and dissemination of the main historical and heritage values. The development of web-based open source GIS applications are very suitable alternatives to reduce costs and to guarantee a rapid development and deployment of applications. This presentation shows the GIS application development strategy, as well as its main characteristics and results. This work was supported by the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC). FOSS4G2006 - Free And Open Source Software for Geoinformatics Posters Eritk Guerra Figueredo eritk@dic.ohc.cu Julio Portieles Fleites julio@coopera.ohc.cu Patricia Rodriguez Aloma patricia@pmaestro.ohc.cu Vivian Fernández Martín vivian@coopera.ohc.cu Pablo Fornet Gil pablo@pmaestro.ohc.cu Jorge luis Batista Hechevarria pb@dic.ohc.cu Eritk Guerra Figueredo eritk@dic.ohc.cu Vivian Fernández Martín vivian@coopera.ohc.cu Jorge luis Batista Hechevarria pb@dic.ohc.cu <MaKaC.conference.ContributionType object at 0xb483a0ac>