Publication Date:
2021-05-19
Description:
From July 16 to 20, 2007, international partners in a trans-
Atlantic workshop series on coastal mapping and informatics,
held a workshop on the campus of Oregon State University
entitled “Coastal Atlas Interoperability.” The workshop engaged
27 participants from 6 countries, representing 17 organizations
and multiple areas of scientific and technicial expertise. This
meeting was a follow-up to a successful first workshop entitled
“Potentials and Limitations of Coastal Web Atlases,” hosted by
the Coastal and Marine Resources Centre (CMRC) at University
College Cork in Ireland in July 2006 (O’Dea et al., 2007). While
that first workshop examined state-of-the-art developments in
coastal web atlases (CWAs) from the Europe and the U.S., shared several case studies and
lessons learned, and established key issues and recommendations related to the design, data
requirements, technology and institutional capacity needed for these atlases, the purpose of
the second workshop was to examine best practices for achieving interoperability between
CWAs. Given that no CWA functions alone as an island, and is often part of a larger
universe of resources that is needed for effective marine spatial planning, resource
management, and emergency planning, CWAs must build a common approach toward
managing and disseminating the coastal data, maps and information that they contain.
Workshop participants examined the issue of semantic interoperability (where concepts,
terminology, even abbreviations that are shared between two or more individuals, systems,
or organizations are understood by all to mean the same thing) and found this to be an
important prerequisite for the integrated approach needed when working with a broader
network of CWAs. For example, the terminology used to describe similar data can vary
between specialties or regions, which can complicate data searches and integration. Use of
the word “seabed” in Europe versus use of the word “seafloor” to describe the same feature
in North America is a good example of this scenario, as is the interchangeable use of
“coastline” versus “shoreline” in both regions. Agreements on content/semantic
interoperability can help to eliminate such problems, making searches between disparate,
but mutually beneficial, projects feasible. Ontologies provide the mechanism for enabling
this, and workshop participants gained hands-on experience with some of the effective tools
and approaches for creating ontologies and organizing them in catalogs, as presented by
representatives of the Marine Metadata Interoperability (MMI) project. Presenters provided
examples from use cases and ontologies based on recent research and the outcomes of the
2005 MMI Advancing Domain Vocabularies workshop (Graybeal et al., 2006).
During the workshop a project was outlined to develop a demonstration prototype as a
proof-of-concept to inter-relate metadata and other information between two initial CWAs
(the Marine Irish Digital Atlas or MIDA, 〈http://mida.ucc.ie〉, and the Oregon Coastal Atlas
or OCA, 〈http://www.coastalatlas.net〉). The prototype is in the form of a catalogue services
for the Web (CSW), where web map services (WMS) will be registered. It may not be
immediately obvious how Oregon and Ireland may need to be interoperable, but these two
mature atlas efforts can be used as a testbed for interoperability. Both provide interactive
access to spatial data and metadata via web GIS, use similar technologies (open source
Minnesota MapServer running on Apache web services), and contain metadata meeting
national/international standards (i.e., FGDC and ISO). This proof-of-concept may then be
used to make connections within regional partnerships (e.g., the OCA can use lessons learned in developing a regional network of CWAs with Washington and California, while
the MIDA can do the same for building and strengthening atlas networks with the UK,
Belgium, and other parts of Europe). The prototype is therefore envisioned as a seed
application, a template of sorts that can be used by many others and develop further from
there.
The workshop on “Coastal Atlas Interoperability” is another step toward long-term goals of
the trans-Atlantic workshop team to provide recommendations for best practices on all
aspects of coastal web mapping, and to develop a cadre of scientists who will play a
leadership role in forging international collaborations and technical solutions of value to the
participating nations. Toward this end, the technical experts, scientists, decision makers and
practitioners of the workshops in Ireland and Oregon have now organized under the (as yet)
informal International Coastal Atlas Network (ICAN; see list of participating institutions in
Appendix A). The strategic aim of ICAN is to share experiences and to find common
solutions to CWA development whilst ensuring maximum relevance and added value for
the end users. This is a mutually beneficial international activity with complementary
strengths in evidence on both sides of the Atlantic, and with the additional provision of
international experience for students and junior researchers.
The long-term view is for global level operational interoperability which will evolve as the
ICAN community strives to increase awareness of the opportunities that exist for increased
coastal and marine data sharing among policy makers and resource managers as strategic
users of a CWA. We see ICAN participants as playing a leadership role in forging
international collaborations of value to the participating nations. A major goal is to help
build a functioning digital atlas of the global coast based on the principle of sharing
distributed information. We will go about this by organizing a cooperative interoperability
and network project to globally integrate locally-maintained coastal atlases as the premier
source of spatial reference information about the coastal zone of all coastlines throughout
the world. We will do this by developing community-held constraints on mapping and
presentation conventions to maximize the comparability and reliability of information about
our coasts. This is done to provide a basis for rationally-informed discussion, debate and
negotiation of sustainable management policies for our societies, nations and people
throughout the world. This has tremendous potential to be relevant not only on both sides
of the Atlantic for the North American and European partners involved, but also has
implications for global spatial data infrastructures and Internet mapping projects.
Based on the success of the workshop in Oregon, the European Environment Agency will
host a third workshop from July 7-9, 2008 in Copenhagen, Denmark, to significantly
advance these goals by examining how communities in Europe can use the
recommendations and prototype developed thus far to improve their data systems’
interoperability. As a result, ICAN will:
1. exhibit the proof-of-concept conceived of at the Oregon workshop and validate first
outcomes,
2. share results to inform and attract a larger population of potential stakeholders of
the activity, and
3. develop a long-term strategy for effective governance of ICAN and further
applications.
Description:
US National Science Foundation; Oregon State University; Coastal & Marine Research Centre, University College Cork, Ireland; ERI
Description:
Published
Keywords:
Coastal web atlas
;
Coastal atlas
;
Data access
;
Web GIS
;
Information management
;
Decision-making tools
;
Coastal informatics
;
Metadata
;
Semantic interoperability
;
Regional governance
;
Spatial data infrastructures (SDI)
Repository Name:
AquaDocs
Type:
Report
,
Non Refereed
Format:
43pp.
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