A Prototype Ontology Tool and Interface for Coastal Atlas Interoperability

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. This study reports on the second of two transatlantic workshops that bring together key experts from Europe, the United States and Canada to examine state-of-the-art developments in coastal web atlases (CWA), based on web enabled geographic information systems (GIS), along with future needs in mapping and informatics for the coastal practitioner community. While multiple benefits are derived from these tailor-made atlases (e.g. speedy access to multiple sources of coastal data and information; economic use of time by avoiding individual contact with different data holders), the potential exists to derive added value from the integration of disparate CWAs, to optimize decision-making at a variety of levels and across themes. The second workshop focused on the development of a strategy to make coastal web atlases interoperable by way of controlled vocabularies and ontologies. The strategy is based on web service oriented architecture and an implementation of Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) web services, such as Web Feature Services (WFS) and Web Map Service (WMS). Atlases publishes Catalog Web Services (CSW) using ISO 19115 metadata and controlled vocabularies encoded as Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs). URIs allows the terminology of each atlas to be uniquely identified and facilitates mapping of terminologies using semantic web technologies. A domain ontology was also created to formally represent coastal erosion terminology as a use case, and with a test linkage of those terms between the Marine Irish Digital Atlas and the Oregon Coastal Atlas. A web interface is being developed to discover coastal hazard themes in distributed coastal atlases as part of a broader International Coastal Atlas Network (ICAN). Lessons learned from this prototype will help build regional atlases and improve decision support systems.