While significant capacity has been built in the field of web-based coastal mapping and informatics in the last decade, little has been done to take stock of the implications of these efforts or to identify best practice in terms of taking lessons learned into consideration. An initial series of two transatlantic workshops brought together key experts from Europe, the United States and Canada to examine state-of-the-art developments in web-based coastal mapping and informatics, along with future needs in mapping and informatics for the coastal practitioner community.

Workshop 3 in Denmark was held in July of 2008.

These workshops aim to advance research in the field by providing recommendations for best practices in coastal web mapping and to develop a cadre of scientists (now formalized as the International Coastal Atlas Network or ICAN), who will play a leadership role in forging international collaborations and technical solutions of value to the participating nations (e.g., a semantic mediation tool for web atlas metadata).

July 16-20, 2007: Coastal Atlas Interoperability (main program, July 17-19), Corvallis, Oregon, USA

In this follow-up workshop to the Cork gathering in 2006, expert delegates examined a variety of experiences in coastal mapping to build a common approach to managing and disseminating coastal data, maps and information, including steps toward an agreement on initial common ontologies and controlled vocabularies. The purpose of these is to facilitate better database searches between atlases in Europe and North America. Final recommendations will be made available online to the research community. Presenters included Luis Bermudez and Stephanie Watson of the Marine Metadata Interoperability project.

Major goals of this workshop included:
- 1 Gaining an understanding of controlled vocabularies (CVs)
- 1.1 Introduction to CVs and ontologies
- 1.2 Hands on experience with common tools constructing and mapping vocabularies
- 2 Start developing our own CVs
- 2.1 Ireland
- 2.1.1 Present an Irish coastal CV in an ontology.
- 2.2 Oregon
- 2.2.1 Present an Oregon coastal CV in an ontology.
- 3 Make Oregon and Irish vocabularies interoperable
- 3.1 Approach - mapping themes together
- 3.2 Approach mapping them to a central ontology (less intrusive)
- 4 Linking with broader networks (e.g., international coastal atlas network)
- 4.1 Start developing an international coastal atlas ontology.
Super encompassing ontology for Ireland and Oregon
- 4.2 Align Irish coastal atlas with the international coastal atlas ontology
- 4.3 Align Oregon coastal atlas with the international coastal atlas ontology
- 5 Enough to write proposal to go further
- 5.1 Guarantee that participants understand:
- 5.1.1 What controlled vocabularies are
- 5.1.2 What ontologies are
- 5.1.3 How they solve semantic interoperability issues
- 5.1.4 Tools that exist
- 5.1.5 How to use the created mappings

After attending this workshop, some participants remained in lovely Oregon in order to attend Coastal Zone '07, just up the road a bit in Portland.

Host: Oregon State University, USA

Location: Memorial Union, Oregon State University campus, Corvallis, Oregon, USA

Contact: Dawn Wright (email response form)

 

In this first workshop, expert delegates examined the current situation by studying a broad variety of existing coastal web atlases from Europe and the US. The various common issues were identified and discussed (e.g., institutional support, atlas design and usability, data accessibility, data and metadata compatibility, web-based tools for decision-support, etc.). At this workshop, the Marine Irish Digital Atlas was also officially launched.

American participation was funded by the National Science Foundation. Hosting of the event was sponsored partly by the Coastal and Marine Resources Centre as well as the Marine Institute's Marine RTDI Networking and Technology Transfer Initiative under Ireland's National Development Plan.

Host: Coastal and Marine Resources Centre, University College Cork, IRELAND

Location: University College Cork campus

Contact: Liz O'Dea (l.odea-at-ucc.ie)

Download FINAL REPORT