COINAtlantic: Measuring Progress for Data Accessibility

COINAtlantic is searching for data providing organizations willing to participate in a pilot project to use and give feedback on a Data Accessibility Self-Assessment Tool. The tool is for use in data providing organizations to develop a benchmark to monitor progress in improving the organization’s policies and procedures for providing effective and easy access to the data and information held by them. The data accessibility principles used in the tool is an aggregation of four documents: the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development’s Principles and Guidelines for Access to Research Data from Public Funding; the Government of Canada’s Operating Principles for the Open Government site; the United States Memorandum on Open Data Policy; and the G8 Charter for Open Data . The 11 principles are shown in the Table 1.

For each principle one or more evaluation ladders have been developed with questions designed to assist the user in positioning their organization’s policies and procedures on the ladder. A sample evaluation ladder for the Evaluation Principle is shown below.

Following the pilot project, the feedback from the data providing organizations that used the tool will be incorporated. If you would be willing to test out this self-assessment tool and share your scores and comments with COINAtlantic, contact Andy Sherin This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. Reporting on the use of the tool will not divulge the source of any scores shared with COINAtlantic.

Funding for the development of the tool came from the Adaptation Platform, Natural Resources Canada.

OceanWise offers WMS of IMO Adopted Areas

OceanWise, the independent marine data management and publishing specialist, has recently included Traffic Separation Schemes (TSS), Particularly Sensitive Sea Areas (PSSA) and other International Maritime Organisation (IMO) adopted areas in its marine mapping dataset, Marine Themes.  The areas are available in GIS compatible file formats and as an OceanWise hosted OGC compliant web service making the data ideally suited for inclusion in web based coastal and marine atlases and similar systems. 

The IMO adopted area datasets are captured from approved IMO documentation and converted into GIS compatible formats under license.  The dataset is normally updated within 5 working days of proposed new or amended areas being published and are therefore available to value added publishers and end users as soon as they are adopted.    

In addition to incorporating the IMO adopted areas into Marine Themes, OceanWise has launched an OGC compliant Web Map Service (WMS) for the data.  The IMO Areas WMS contains worldwide data and can be read directly into most desktop and web based Geographic Information Systems (GIS).  It is ideal for organizations, including progressive Hydrographic Offices, wishing to access definitive source data rather than legacy datasets that have been captured from paper charts.  The image shows OceanWise’s IMO Areas WMS in conjunction with OpenStreeMap, although other base maps, such as the GEBCO worldwide bathymetric dataset, OceanWise’s ENC WMS and of course Marine Themes itself are also available. 

For more information contact This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Scotland’s National Marine Plan interactive continues to grow

National Marine Plan interactive is about to reach 400 layers. This represents a huge data resource for marine planning stakeholders, available on their own PC. We have come a long way in the last few years in making data available on-line.

New data layers continue to be added and amongst recent layers are the ‘Marine Protected Areas’ designation and ‘Draft Special Protection Areas’ made in July 2014. Also, all the draft National Marine Plan maps, on which Marine Scotland consulted last year, can now be found in a new section called ‘Draft National Marine Plan – 2013’ as an archive of the spatial data in the draft plan. Updated data sets for these maps will be added to NMPi.

If you would like a url to a specific data layer to use in documents (which will open NMPi with that data layer turned on), you can obtain these from a new feature - List of available layers (copy the short cut under the hyperlink).

Marine Scotland continues to work with its partners Scottish Environmental Protection Agency (SEPA), Scottish Natural Heritage (SNH), Joint Nature Conservation Committee (JNCC), the Marine Alliance for Science and Technology Scotland (MASTS) and the emerging regional marine planning partnerships, to develop layers that will be relevant and valuable for both national and regional marine planning.

Feedback on NMPi is always welcome and can be e-mailed to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

CoastGIS 2015: 12th International Symposium for GIS and Computer Cartography for Coastal Zone Management 22-24 April 2015 Western Cape, South Africa

The 12th International Symposium for GIS and Computer Cartography for Coastal Zone Management (CoastGIS 2015) will take place in the Western Cape, South Africa, from April 22-24 2015. This event will be held back-to-back with 7th meeting of the International Coastal Atlas Network (ICAN).

The Symposium theme “Rich Data, Poor Data: Geospatial Creativity and Innovation for Managing Changing Coastal Systems” refers to the increasing demand on decision-makers and managers to be aware of changes in the coastal and marine environment.  Not only must there be a much greater emphasis on the measuring of change, but also increasing and creative options for data poor and rich environments alike, to act on the observed changes, which may have either positive or negative societal impacts.  In other words, how can CoastGIS 2015 contribute to the understanding of coastal change, and how can the powerful tools we use, as a scientific and management community; help us make better decisions, especially in data-limited environments?  Can we demonstrate how the excellence, passion and creativity in the various disciplines encompassed by CoastGIS be used to improve the use of science for decision-making relating to coastal management?

Planned sessions include:

• Analysing and modelling coastal and marine processes
• Spatial information and observation systems
• Coastal risk and vulnerability
• Advances in data visualization
• Advances in geographical information technologies
• Decision-support and spatial planning
• Innovative application of geospatial technologies in coastal environments
• Coastal mapping and monitoring
• Coping with data scarcity in coastal and marine management
• Coastal and marine spatial data infrastructure (SDI)
• Application of geospatial technologies to support climate change adaptation in coastal regions

Abstract submission for the CoastGIS2015 Symposium is open and instructions on how to submit an extended abstract can be found on the website at www.coastgis2015.co.za. The abstract submission deadline is 24 October 2014.  The Symposium venue is the Protea Hotel Breakwater Lodge near the Cape Town waterfront and in the shadow of icon Table Mountain.  The City of Cape has many accommodation options, a vibrant inner-city social scene with numerous restaurants, bars and cafes.

The CoastGIS2015 local organising committee and international scientific committee would love to welcome you to Cape Town in April 2015.  Please contact Louis Celliers (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.) for more information.

ICAN 7: Coastal Web Atlases – Supporting Ecosystem Based Management

The ICAN 7 workshop will take place in beautiful Cape Town, South Africa on April 19-20, 2015 just before the CoastGIS conference. The focus this year is on how coastal web atlases can support ecosystem based management. 

If you would like to present a paper on your atlas development or usage experiences in relation to the activities below, please send a title and a brief (approx. 250 word) abstract before 31 October 2014 to Ned Dwyer (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.) or Marcia Berman (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.) for consideration by the workshop organising committee.

Looming large and welcoming you to
Cape Town, is the iconic Table Mountain
Photo: Cape Town Tourism

Key activities at the ICAN-7 workshop will include:

• exploring the opportunities for  CWAs to address the objectives of managing and protecting LMEs;
  
  
• discussing the challenges of Atlas development and usage in the African Atlas community;
  
  
• sharing knowledge and experience on approaches to data licencing and data sharing in order to make data holdings more visible;
  
  
• a session on “interoperability for dummies” which aims to demystify coastal atlas interoperability and highlight the benefits; and
  
  
• a small “workshop within a workshop” for atlas technical developers on how to become a new node in the ICAN interoperability demonstrator, using the updated cookbooks
  
  
• development of an ICAN work plan for the period 2015-2017.
  
  
• Face-to-face meeting of the ICAN Steering Group

This workshop follows on 2013’s successful workshop ICAN 6: Expanding Participation in Coastal Web Atlas Development and Use”, held at the University of Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, as well as five previous workshops held in 2006, 2007, 2008 and 2009 and 2011.

A range of accommodation options in the Stellenbosch area are available. More information here soon.

ICAN 7 is co-organized by Ned Dwyer Eur-Ocean, Kathrin Kopke of the Coastal and Marine Research Centre, Ireland; Lucy Scott, United Nations Development Programme- Global Environment Facility, South Africa; Louis Celliers, Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, South Africa; Marcia Berman, Virginia Institute of Marine Science, USA; Alejandro Iglesias Campos, UNESCO-IOC (Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission). The ICAN 7 workshop is sponsored in part by IODE.

Information on reaching Stellenbosch and the venue will be posted here soon

Organizers and Sponsors ICAN 7

ICAN 6: Report now available

Ned Dwyer,
Kathrin Kopke

The full report on the ICAN 6 workshop held in June 2013 is now available on the ICAN website at: http://www.oceandocs.org/handle/1834/6612. Here is a sneak preview of the Executive Summary.

From June 16th to 17th, 2013, the International Coastal Atlas Network (ICAN) held a workshop on “Expanding Participation in Coastal Web Atlas Development and Use”, at the University of Victoria, British Columbia, Canada. The workshop (aka “ICAN 6”) engaged 29 participants from 9 countries, representing 22 organizations and multiple areas of scientific and technical expertise. This meeting was a follow-up to the successful 2011 workshop on “Coastal Atlases as Engines for Coastal & Marine Spatial Planning” (aka “ICAN 5”) held in Oostende, Belgium, as well as workshops in 2009, 2008, 2007 and 2006.

ICAN 6 provided an opportunity to discuss how the ICAN community could take advantage of now being an IODE project to share its knowledge and aid capacity building among IOC member states in relation to coastal and marine data management. Moreover, ICAN has seen its membership grow in the last two years and given its extensive membership along the North and South American Pacific coasts it was a great opportunity to hear about atlas developments in those regions.

Key activities at the workshop included:

• exploring the opportunities for ICAN in an IODE context and how to build synergies with other IOC projects; the activities of the Ocean Biogeographic Information System (OBIS) project of the IOC were presented as well as IOC’s ICAM programme which highlighted how data management tools developed within ICAN can contribute to the goals of ICAM. Beyond the IOC, activities within the Group on Earth Observations’ (GEO) Coastal Zone Community of Practise (CZCP) are very relevant to ICAN, in particular the objective to develop a global coastal zone information system (CZIS). ICAN can help inform the development of such a CZIS
  
  
• discussion of coastal atlas training needs and how ICAN members can contribute; in particular the training requirements of the African Coastal and Marine Atlas, and the Caribbean Marine Atlas were discussed. An overview of IODE training activities was presented and linkages on training between ICAN and ICAM related projects (e.g. SPINCAM II) were discussed. ICAN should also take advantage of the OceanTeacher platform developed by IODE
  
  
• Atlas Stories – presentations from Atlas developers and users from North and South American Pacific coasts and beyond; the ICAN 6 Atlas Stories focused on CWA development around the Western Pacific Rim presenting new activities as well as updating the network on recent upgrades to previously discussed CWAs. The session started with the South American SPINCAM project which is developing atlases across five countries, followed by updates on the Oregon Coastal Atlas and the Washington State Coastal Atlas. Workshop participants also learned about Canada’s CanCoast and ShoreZone and the session concluded with the introduction to SmartAtlas through the African Coastal & Marine Atlas Experience
  
  
• a small “workshop within a workshop” for atlas technical developers on how to become a new node in the ICAN interoperability portal, version 3; The latest version has multilingual search capability, semantic search and the ability to connect directly to map services and display the results in a map. It was agreed that the current interface will be upgraded to HTML5 in the coming period
  
  
• a small “workshop within a workshop” focussing on Volunteered Geographical Information (VGI) and its implications for coastal atlases; within the EEA, systems have been developed using both crowdsourcing and citizen science approaches. SeaSketch is a software platform intended as an end-to-end mapping solution for marine spatial planning, which allows anyone, regardless of their technical abilities, to sketch prospective management plans and receive analytical feedback on the consequences of their designs. The Marine Regions project aims to develop a standard for georeferenced marine names and there is potential to link it to the ICAN portal. Esri is introducing the concept of a “living Atlas” which is delivered via ArcGIS Online (AGOL). ICAN members can take advantage of this concept by using it to leverage their existing Atlas holdings or by using the platform to build a new Atlas quickly
  
  
• development of an ICAN work plan for the period 2013-2015; this included plans for developing a communications strategy, a handbook on how atlas developers and users can interact and building synergies with other IOC and non-IOC projects. It also looked at developing a coastal atlas training plan. At its core ICAN supports atlas development and interoperability approaches, therefore the Technical Committee presented its plans for developments in the next two years.

The workshop concluded with the first face-to-face meeting of the new Steering Group, which was put in place after ICAN became an IODE project. This meeting saw two new members join the SG and appointed leads to the various work plan elements.

Since ICAN 6 there have been developments in relation to the work plan.  A revised plan and associated budget request was submitted to the IODE Officers meeting held in March 2014. As IODE has a limited budget and a number of projects to support, not all work plan items will receive funding, however the funding allocated will be of significant assistance to maintain ICAN and help progress its work. ICAN is now on a sound footing as part of the IODE family of projects, although members should continue to seek funding from other sources to advance the key technical activities. This ambitious work plan will require the commitment of all members to ensure that it can be implemented. A priority for 2014 is the redevelopment of the web site in order to make it easier to navigate and more responsive to user needs. Interoperability remains a core activity of ICAN and the technical committee has proposed a number of activities to progress further the developments in this area. A key technical concept which emerged at ICAN 6 was that of an “atlas-in-a-box”. The idea is that a new atlas developer can get started quickly on implementing and publishing a CWA with a minimal amount of technical/programming knowledge.  The committee intends to scope the feasibility of such a development based on potential solutions such as SmartAtlas and ArcGIS Online.

We would like to thank Rosaline Canessa and her team at the University of Victoria for their warm welcome and excellent hosting of ICAN-6 and we look forward to seeing you at the 7th International workshop (aka “ICAN 7”) which will be hosted in South Africa from 20-21 April 2015 just before CoastGIS 2015.

The Wisconsin Coastal Atlas: Helping Build a Coastal Spatial Data Infrastructure

The Wisconsin Coastal Atlas (http://wicoastalatlas.net/) is a web resource that helps people better understand coastal issues, share coastal data, and inform decision-making about sustainable use of the Great Lakes. It is intended for use by coastal resource managers, planners, researchers, educators, tourists, and citizen scientists and builds on many years of collaboration between the University of Wisconsin Sea Grant College Program and the Land Information and Computer Graphics Facility at the University of Wisconsin-Madison to leverage the sizeable investment in local government land information systems and apply geospatial technologies to address Great Lakes issues.

The Wisconsin Coastal Atlas (WCA) is modeled after the Oregon Coastal Atlas (http://coastalatlas.net/) and organized into four sections: maps, catalog, tools, and learn. A gallery of interactive maps provides customized perspectives related to specific coastal issues in Wisconsin. An example is the Fox-Wolf Hydrologic Dashboard, which visualizes the spatial pattern of large precipitation events and the resulting impacts on streamflow. The catalog section of the atlas provides several paths to discover, assess, and download geospatial data for the Great Lakes coasts of Wisconsin. At the center is a simple data download matrix based on the open data catalog at the City of Vancouver, British Columbia. Finally, the atlas serves as a gateway to spatial decision support tools relevant to Great Lakes management and provides access to educational resources about coastal issues in Wisconsin.

The WCA, however, is more than just a web portal that provides access to coastal data and tools – it is also a research project that is helping to build a coastal spatial data infrastructure for Wisconsin. Since February 2010, the project has tackled several research topics, including: 1) structured design and evaluation of web atlases; 2) guidance on making choices among different web mapping technologies; 3) promotion of sound cartographic design principles for web mapping interfaces; 4) development of effective archives for coastal geospatial data; 5) application of ontology tools to promote semantic mediation of local government spatial data sets to conduct spatial analyses of coastal issues at a regional scale;  and 6) advancing social science methods to improve the effectiveness of coastal decision support tools.  The primary motivation is demonstrating that the atlas can serve as an interoperable resource that both integrates local geospatial data for coastal management in Wisconsin and can serve as a component of a larger networked Great Lakes Coastal Atlas.

One way to demonstrate the WCA as an interoperable resource is through participation in the ICAN Prototype (http://ican2.ucc.ie/atlas/). A key technologies that supports the WCA is GeoNetwork (http://geonetwork-opensource.org/) - an interoperable geospatial metadata catalog that supports the Catalogue Service for the Web (CSW) standards developed by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC). A total of 57 geospatial data sets are documented and accessible through the WCA GeoNetwork. With the assistance of Yassine Lassoued, Roy Lowry and Tanya Haddad, the Wisconsin project team followed the steps in the ICAN semantic interoperability pilot cookbooks developed as part of the NETMAR project (http://netmar.nersc.no/) to connect to the ICAN Prototype.  The result is the ability to search for Wisconsin coastal data as part of a global network of coastal atlases.

In an effort to share research findings, papers completed as part of the WCA project are available for download in the “About” section of the atlas. This includes two white papers that may be of interest to the ICAN community:

Bibliography

• Sack, Carl and Tim Wallace. 2012. Tools and Best Practices for Coastal Web Maps
  
  
• Sack, Carl. 2013. User-Centered Design for Coastal Web Atlas Maps and Tools: A Process Manual

COINAtlantic Search Utility Enhanced

The Atlantic Coastal Zone Information Steering Committee’s (ACZISC) COINAtlantic Search Utility (CSU) has received a number of enhancements. The CSU searches the internet using the Google Custom Search API for web mapping services (WMS) and KML spatial resources that meet the search criteria entered by the user. The user can then chose to add the resulting resources to the map and save the map as an image, pdf or Geotiff.

The CSU enhancements include:

1. The speed of loading the application has been improved by reducing the size of Java script libraries;
   
   
2. A web mapping service can now be added to the map directly from the “URL link to functional mapping server” field found in the metadata display at the bottom of the CSU window (see red box in the figure above for the WMS provided by the Ocean Tracking Network);
   
   
3. The CSU now uses the GetLegendGraphic feature of the WMS standard to display a legend for an added spatial resource;
   
   
4. The CSU maintains a local data base of discovered spatial resources that can also be searched using the “Local Database Search” tab. When the “Add WMS layer” feature of the CSU is executed manually by the user, the URL and abstract metadata for the added WMS layer is added to the local database.

Thusly, the local database grows with the use of the CSU, accumulating the results of searches and the manual entries of WMS.

The metadata displayed at the bottom of the figure above was generated by the COINAtlantic GeoContent Generator (CGG), a web-based application, that captures ‘bare bones’ discovery metadata and integrates it with a graphic KML (i.e. point, line, or polygon) that describes the geography the entry is relevant to. The KML can be chosen from a library of KML templates, drawn by hand, or uploaded. The CGG then publishes the KML to the internet and facilitates its discovery by the Google search engine.

Further enhancements are planned including enabling the local database to respond to CSW requests and the CSU search to query CSW-compatible metadata catalogs in addition to the present search of the internet.

The new version of the CSU will be released to coincide with the COINAtlantic Training Workshop to be held on 20 June 2014 just after the Coastal Zone Canada 2014 conference being held in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada from 15-19 June 2014. The workshop will not only familiarize participants with the use of the CSU and the CGG, but Jeff McKenna of Gateway Geomatics will take participants ‘under the hood’ and introduce the Open Source components used to build the tools. Follow @coinatlantic for the announcement of the new version of the CSU.

CSW, ontology webinar and SmartAtlas Workshop

A webinar on CSW, semantics and ontologies was sponsored by COINAtlantic and followed by a workshop on SmartAtlas 21-22 May 2014 in Halifax. The agenda included an Introduction to OGC and CSW by Jeff McKenna, Gateway Geomatics and a member of OGC, the ICAN CSW mediator by Yassine Lassoued (CMRC), ISO ontology initiatives by Jean Brodeur, Natural Resources Canada, Ontology research at Memorial University by Arnaud Vandecasteele, and ICAN ontology development again by Yassine. The presentations and video will be posted on www.coinatlantic.ca Follow @coinatlantic to find out when they will be available.

SPINCAM gets to grips with SmartAtlas

Mr. Steve Erique, who works at the Comisión Permanente del Pacifico Sur (CPPS) office in Ecuador made a one-week training visit to the Coastal and Marine Research Centre (CMRC) in Cork, Ireland in May 2014. CPPS is responsible for regional atlas developments for  the IOC-sponsored SPINCAM. Steve has already deployed SmartAtlas and is testing its potential to be the operational technology for the development of the SPINCAM regional Atlas. During his visit Steve learned more about tailoring SmartAtlas and some of the ‘tips and tricks’ to get the most out of the SmartAtlas technology. The CMRC will continue to assist SPINCAM and CPPS in training and customisation of  SmartAtlas in the coming months.