Report on Atlas Interoperability Released

The first workshop in the series (Potentials and Limitations of Coastal Web Atlases), hosted by the Coastal and Marine Resources Centre (CMRC) at University College Cork, Ireland, 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 second workshop (Coastal Atlas Interoperability), hosted by Oregon State University, Corvallis, Oregon, focused on the specific challenge of access and exchange of coastal data, maps, and information via a common point, without the need to search aimlessly within separate atlases. In other words, how best to get these many atlases to truly interoperate ?

The second workshop examined best practices for achieving interoperability between CWAs, including the use of controlled vocabularies and ontologies. As a result of the workshop, a demonstration (proof-of-concept) prototype to inter-relate metadata and other information between two initial CWAs was designed, and is currently being developed for use by the coastal resource management community worldwide. This prototype includes an Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Catalog Services for the Web interface where various Web Map Services (WMSs) will be registered and cross-referenced with ontologies.

The technical experts, scientists, decision makers and practitioners of the workshops in both Cork and Corvallis have now organized under "International Coastal Atlas Network" or ICAN. The strategic aim of ICAN is to share experiences and find common solutions to CWA development, while ensuring maximum relevance and added value for end users.

Please see http://workshop1.science.oregonstate.edu for further details or to register your interest in joining ICAN.