The International Coastal Atlas Network (ICAN) is a newly-founded informal group of organizations who have been meeting over the past two years to scope and implement data interoperability approaches to coastal web atlases (CWAs). The mission/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. 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.

View our interoperability prototype at ican.ucc.ie. Background on this prototype may be found in this AGU poster abstract and the Report of Trans-Atlantic Workshop 2 on Coastal Atlas Interoperability.

If you would like to join ICAN initiative or be kept apprised of our progress please feel free to use the comment feature below or to email Dawn Wright or Val Cummins.

We do not have a formal organizational or governance structure yet, but will be working on this in the summer of 2008.

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Participating Institutions in a new International Coastal Atlas Network (ICAN)
Coastal and Marine Resources Centre, University College Cork, Ireland
Department of Geosciences, Oregon State University, USA
African Marine Atlas (South African Institute for Aquatic Biodiversity)
British Oceanographic Data Centre, England, UK
California Coastal Commission, USA
Caribbean Marine Atlas
Co-ordination Centre for ICZM, Belgium
Department of Geography, University of Washington, USA
Department of Marine, Ireland
Environment & Heritage Service, Northern Ireland, UK
European Environment Agency, Denmark
Flanders Marine Institute, European Network for Coastal Research, Belgium
Geological Survey of Ireland
Institute for Natural Resources, Oregon State University, USA
Marine Institute, Ireland
Marine Metadata Interoperability (MMI)
Maritime & Coastguard Agency, UK
Memorial University Newfoundland, Canada
Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, USA
NOAA Coastal Services Center, USA
Oregon Coastal Management Program, USA
San Diego Supercomputer Center, USA
Scripps Institution of Oceanography, USA
Strangford Lough Management Committee, Northern Ireland, UK
Ulster Museum, Northern Ireland, UK
UNESCO IODE (International Oceanographic Data and Information Exchange)
University of Ulster, Northern Ireland, UK
Université Paul Cézanne, France
Virginia Institute of Marine Science, USA
Washington Coastal Atlas
Wisconsin Sea Grant’s Digital Great Lakes and Coastal Communities

At Coastal Zone '07, expressions of interest for future involvement received from:
Channel Coast Observatory (UK)

NOAA’s Digital Coast: Legislative Atlas
… and many more welcome!