Red

La membresía de ICAN está abierta a todas las partes interesadas que aceptan la misión y los objetivos de ICAN, incluidos aquellos que tienen un Atlas web costero operativo, así como aquellos que esperan diseñar y construir un Atlas web.

Internacional

ICAN es un proyecto del Programa IODE de la COI de la UNESCO, y los miembros de ICAN buscan desempeñar un papel de liderazgo en la creación de colaboraciones internacionales de valor para las naciones participantes, optimizando así la gobernanza regional en la gestión de zonas costeras y la planificación espacial marina.

Atlas

Los atlas son "...colecciones de mapas digitales y conjuntos de datos con tablas complementarias, ilustraciones e información que ilustran sistemáticamente la costa, a menudo con herramientas cartográficas y de apoyo a la toma de decisiones, todas las cuales son accesibles a través de Internet.."  O'Dea et al., 2007

Costeros

Vivimos en un planeta azul, con océanos y mares que cubren más del 70% de la superficie de la Tierra. Los océanos nos alimentan, regulan nuestro clima y generan la mayor parte del oxígeno que respiramos. Aproximadamente el 37% de la población mundial vive a menos de 100 km de la costa. (UNEP)

¡Únete a nosotros!

Overview of the Caribbean Marine Atlas

The Caribbean Marine Atlas (CMA) is a regional project involving several countries within the Wider Caribbean Basin in a joint effort to promote sound decision-making through access to high-quality coastal and marine spatial information. The purpose of the CMA is to identify, collect and organize available spatial datasets into an atlas of environmental themes for the Caribbean region. The project is currently under the sponsorship of the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission's (IOC) International Oceanographic Data and Information Exchange (IODE) and Integrated Coastal Area Management (ICAM) Programmes.  The embodiment of the goal of the project is an online mapping and data management application available to environmental managers and other users both within and outside of the Wider Caribbean Region.

In addition, using the skills obtained through the capacity building component of the CMA project, participating countries are in the process of developing national marine atlases based on the structure and functionality of the regional atlas but focused on the national coastal/marine area management priorities of the respective states. Thus the CMA will, through its products and services available at the national level, directly contribute to the sustainable development and integrated management of marine and coastal areas in the region.

All programme activities under the project have been developed and conducted with the above factors as their raison d’être. As a result the CMA programme has the potential to be one of the most significant recent advancements in coastal area management through the development of tools and processes which promote actual fact-based decision making.

Accomplishments

The CMA project is currently in its second phase which began in late 2009 and has already achieved many of its primary goals. These include capacity building within the sphere of marine data management, the production of developer and user resource materials for CMA technologies, and the development of a basic web-based mapping application. Specific achievements and/or activities under these project areas are outlined below.

Capacity Building

A network of Caribbean data managers benefitted from IODE training courses in ocean data management, data mining and web atlas development conducted during phase 1 of the CMA.

Specific training was given for atlas developers via the CMA Training Course on PostgreSQL, PostGIS and OpenLayers for Web-Based Atlas Development in Bridgetown, Barbados in April of 2011.

The development of web-based mapping applications has resulted in the exposure to and growing familiarity with several coding languages (Javascript, PHP, HTML, XML) and software platforms (GeoServer, GeoNetwork).

Development of Resource Materials

The main CMA website www.caribbeanmarineatlas.net is host to information on all of the training courses, planning meetings and national stakeholder meetings conducted as part of the CMA project.

A user manual for the mapping application has been developed and is also available on the main site
Resource materials directly related to national atlas development efforts and other developer-specific materials are available in a section of the main website not open to the general public.

Mapping Application Development

The CMA mapping application has been constructed from three components:

The web map server (GeoServer) http://geonetwork.iode.org/geoserver/web/ hosts the data available under the CMA project (and other IODE projects), publishes the data as a web map service (WMS) for use by the CMA mapping application, but also for any interested party.

The metadata catalog for CMA data (GeoNetwork) http://geonetwork.iode.org/geonetworkCMA/srv/en/main.home hosts the metadata information associated with published CMA datasets, allows users to search for datasets (and any other spatially enabled content) by geographic area.

The mapping application user interface (accessible via the Map Page tab on the main CMA site) allows users basic GIS control over available spatial datasets including query functionality, legends and links to metadata records.

Current Status of the CMA Project

There are several activities relating to the development of both the regional atlas and national atlases are currently being conducted, including:

  • The development of a code template for national atlases,
  • Improving the functionality of the regional atlas,
  • Formatting and uploading additional datasets, and
  • Data gathering for national atlas development projects.


Future of the project

Between 2012 and 2013, several activities are expected to be completed to fulfill the goals of the CMA project, these include:

  • The rollout of several national coastal/marine atlases based on the CMA,
  • Additional national stakeholder meetings,
  • The improvement of functionality for both national and regional atlases,
  • Atlas user and developer training,
  • National-level atlas promotion, and
  • The development of an atlas sustainability strategy

Activities of the ICAN Technical Team, March 2012

Roy Lowry (Esta dirección de correo electrónico está siendo protegida contra los robots de spam. Necesita tener JavaScript habilitado para poder verlo.) and Adam Leadbetter (Esta dirección de correo electrónico está siendo protegida contra los robots de spam. Necesita tener JavaScript habilitado para poder verlo.), BODC, Liverpool, UK,
Declan Dunne(Esta dirección de correo electrónico está siendo protegida contra los robots de spam. Necesita tener JavaScript habilitado para poder verlo.) and Yassine Lassoued (Esta dirección de correo electrónico está siendo protegida contra los robots de spam. Necesita tener JavaScript habilitado para poder verlo.) , CMRC, Cork, Ireland,
Tanya Haddad (Esta dirección de correo electrónico está siendo protegida contra los robots de spam. Necesita tener JavaScript habilitado para poder verlo.), Oregon Coastal Atlas Project, USA,
Liz O’Dea (Esta dirección de correo electrónico está siendo protegida contra los robots de spam. Necesita tener JavaScript habilitado para poder verlo.) State of Washington Department of Ecology, USA

The development of ICAN semantics began with the assembly of a Coastal Erosion ontology to support semantically-enabled atlas layer discovery following the workshop at Corvallis in 2007. Semantically-enabled, or ‘smart’, discovery is where terms supplied by the search client are used to locate metadata that has been marked up using different but semantically related terms.  A much quoted example is a search that returns datasets tagged ‘rainfall’ for a search term of ‘precipitation’.

This work was based on strategies and technologies provided by the Marine Metadata Interoperability (MMI) initiative.  The strategy adopted was to take local vocabularies and ontologies, convert them into Web Ontology Language(OWL) classes using tools like Protégé or TopBraid Composer and then map them to a global ontology, again comprising OWL classes, using the MMI VINE tool. 

Some initial work, the conversion of local vocabularies from the Irish MIDA and Oregon coastal atlases into OWL, was completed but very little mapping work was done subsequently.  The possibility was mooted that the OWL-based approach, particularly some of the tools, created a technological barrier that people were unwilling to surmount. Consequently, in the NETMAR project (see below) an approach was taken where tools such as Microsoft Excel were used to assemble the local vocabularies and the mappings as a series of spreadsheets.  These were then imported into an Oracle database and exported by a Java software layer (the NERC Vocabulary Server or NVS) as a thesaurus conforming to the W3C Simple Knowledge Organisation System (SKOS) standard.

Figure 1. ICAN Coastal Erosion Mapping

Figure 1. ICAN Coastal Erosion Mapping

As a part of this work, the mapping between the Oregon Coastal Atlas and the ICAN Coastal Erosion Global Atlas was completed as shown in Figure 1. The resulting thesaurus is available as a SKOS document from the NVS at the URL http://vocab.nerc.ac.uk/scheme/ICANCOERO. The response returned by the vocabulary server is a SKOS document encoded in RDF-XML. However, a stylesheet has been included to facilitate human browsing of the resource.  Hardcore XML addicts can get their fix through ‘View Source’.  Further work to incorporate the MIDA vocabulary and some terms from the Wisconsin Coastal Atlas are planned for late spring and early summer of 2012.  If anybody has other coastal erosion semantic resources they would like to be mapped in please contact either of the authors at BODC.

Following requests from the ICAN community at the ICAN 5 workshop, a draft ICAN Water Quality Global Thesaurus has been developed as shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2. ICAN Water Quality Global Thesaurus

Figure 2. ICAN Water Quality Global Thesaurus

We would like to develop this into a full semantic discovery resource. However, we need local water quality vocabularies or ontologies for us to map.  If anybody has these available, please get in touch with BODC.  We would also like to hear from anybody interested in working with us to develop semantic resources for Marine Spatial Planning or Climate Risks.

ICAN Cookbooks

Following the ICAN workshop in Copenhagen in 2008, it was decided to provide technical training for costal web atlas developers in the form of cookbooks, especially for people who are starting a new atlas. While the “Coastal Informatics: Web Atlas Design and Implementation” handbook published by IGI-Global in 2011 covers the more theoretical aspects of costal web atlas development, the cookbooks are targeted to contain more practical step-by-step instructions. Consequently, the NETMAR project has produced cookbooks to contribute to this technical training material.

These are:

Understanding Semantics

This cookbook provides a tutorial for those who wish to further investigate and make use of semantic web technologies. For data to be fully understood in a distributed system, they must be labelled (or “marked up”) accordingly. Either the label used throughout the system must use a common set of phrases, or there must be a means of translating between the phrases used at different points of the system. The aim of the cookbook is to provide consistent phrases and to define the relationships in a formal manner, resulting in what is often called a “knowledge organization system”.
In 1999 Tim Berners-Lee wrote “If HTML and the [World Wide] Web made all the online documents look like one huge book, [semantics] will make all the data in the world look like one huge database." The ICAN Understanding Semantics cookbook now provides a tutorial for those who wish to investigate and make use of these technologies, aimed specifically at members of the ICAN community.

Understanding Metadata

This cookbook provides a tutorial for those who wish to better understand metadata. Geospatial metadata is “data about data”. It contains information that documents the basic characteristics of a geospatial data resource. It can also document basic characteristics of geospatial applications or services. Metadata falls into broad categories where it answers the “what, why, when, who, where and how” questions about the resource.

Establishing a CSW metadata catalogue with GeoNetwork opensource

This cookbook provides a tutorial for those who wish to better understand CSW (Catalog Services for the Web) metadata catalogues. It also contains initial pointers to establishing a CSW server using GeoNetwork opensource. A metadata catalogue stores and publishes collections or sets of metadata records describing data, services, and related information resources. Standards are required to enable interoperable searching of distributed metadata catalogues between organisations. This is achieved using the CSW standard

Connecting your Atlas

This cookbook provides a step-by-step guide explaining how to connect a local atlas as a node in the ICAN Prototype and NETMAR Demonstrator. It is a prototype atlas mediator which provides a common interface for accessing distributed local atlases, such as MIDA (Marine Irish Digital Atlas), OCA (Oregon Coastal Atlas), and Washington Coastal Atlas (WCA). It uses a knowledge organization system (KOS) to improve data discovery by exploiting the semantics of keywords and allowing users to search data by “meaning” rather than by “mere keywords.”

The four cookbooks are available in a single PDF file that is currently located at http://netmar.nersc.no/sites/netmar.nersc.no/files/NETMAR_D7.9.1_ICAN_Semantic_Cookbooks.pdf. The NETMAR team plan to update these cookbooks by June 2012. Please get in touch with CMRC if you wish to give us feedback.

ICAN Prototype and NETMAR Demonstrator

Figure 3. Smart search client components and services

The ICAN Prototype and NETMAR Demonstrator provides a graphical user interface which aims to allow users to search data by meaning rather than by mere keywords. Using the ICAN semantic resources it will enable distributed search across local atlases, such as MIDA (Marine Irish Digital Atlas), OCA (Oregon Coastal Atlas), and Washington Coastal Atlas (WCA). The smart search and discovery client currently supports three features: ontology browsing, dataset smart search, and metadata visualisation. Data visualisation and data download are planned.

The search and discovery client helps the user find relevant datasets by allowing him to browse the ontology terms to find suitable search criteria. The ontology browser lists the defined themes, and by clicking on any one of them, their definition is shown along with related terms. From here, the user can inspect any of the related terms by clicking on them, or move on to searching by entering a keyword in the search field. For example, entering “temperature” will search the ontology for any semantically related terms, and display these with definitions inside the browser. When a user has found a suitable search term, he can enter it in the search field at the top of the Ontology Browser window. This will start the dataset smart search application. The search client will present a summary of all datasets matching the criteria, and the user can then click on any of the found datasets to get a full metadata listing for it.

The smart search and discovery client relies on two services: a semantic web service (SWS) and a CSW (Catalogue Service for the Web) mediator (CSWM), as shown in Figure 3. The semantic web service (SWS) provides a high-level interface for retrieving knowledge from the NETMAR ontologies. On top of the catalogue services, a CSW Mediator is responsible for handling metadata semantics and allows data discovery based on semantics.

A test version of the NETMAR Demonstrator is currently located at http://netmar.ucc.ie/discovery/. Please get in touch with CMRC if you wish to connect your atlas to the demonstrator or give feedback.

NETMAR

The Open Service NETwork for MARine Environmental Data is a 3-year project funded by the European Union under its FP7 programme that started in February 2010.  The objective is prototype portal development using Liferay technology incorporating tools such as a viewer, semantic resource browser, CSW semantically-mediated search and WPS chain editor as portlets.  ICAN was one of four demonstration pilots selected for the project.  The work described above would not have been possible without the NETMAR funding.

NETMAR LogoLogoLogo

Figure 3. Smart search client components and services

Para nuestras Costas

Vol, 8, Nr 2 - Now Available!

We are now entering our 9th year publishing the ICAN newsletter. Many thanks to our Editor Andy Sherin!

Please consider preparing an article for the next newsletter that will likely be published in the spring of this year.

Happy New Year!

Photos from CoastGIS 2018

Our friends from CoastGIS 2018 have posted a wonderful gallery of photos, including the recent ICAN mini-workshop:

See how many ICAN members you can spot!