A maritime roadmap in the cloud

Web mapping has morphed from sharing maps and geospatial information to a geospatial content management system that supports collaboration. The new iteration allows for the publication and sharing with others, as well as the access to rich global base data through cloud services. The European EMODnet initiative provides an excellent showcase to the world what can be achieved today. This presentation will highlight the latest developments on portal and geospatial cloud services as the basis for sharing in a Marine SDI, and how the maritime community can benefit from this right away. Various examples of maritime cloud services (Emodnet, Eye on Earth) will be discussed to illustrate the capabilities provided by these developments. New technologies and especially those dealing with the latest web-trends are easily consumed and applied. This introduces a risk of a series of new services and start-ups all competing for our attention causing the reverse effect of what we try achieve: easier access to collaborative information and better tools to analyze and understand it. Instead we end up looking for a road map. Esri long supports data interoperability and sharing, and understands these challenges. In this presentation we will give an insider's view on Esri's vision for a road map that allows data managers and data users to collaborate effectively using a platform approach, optimizing cloud computing and GIS to allow access from many devices and for many applications. The presentation will conclude by highlighting how this platform can be implemented and utilized, supported by the ocean content initiative, to facilitate collaborative knowledge building, decision making and knowledge management in general in oceanography and ocean sciences.