TC-002
A MARINE BIOLOGICAL GIS FOR EUROPE, BASED ON OGC
STANDARDS
Simon Claus, Leen Vandepitte, B art Vanhoorne, N athalie De H auwere, Francisco Hernandez
Flanders Marine Institute, Oostende, Belgium, Corresponding author: simon.claus@vliz.be
Keywords: m arine biology, data integration, GIS, data portal, E urope
A BSTRA C T
in D ecem ber 2007 the European Parliam ent and Council adopted a com mon text for the
M arine Strategy Fram ew ork Directive w hich aims to achieve environm entally healthy marine
waters by 2020. This D irective includes a requirem ent for an overarching European M arine
O bservation and D ata Netw ork (EM ODNET). The "proof o f concept" o f EM O D N ET is
being tested through preparatory actions. Portals for a num ber o f m aritim e basins are being
set up for biological, physical, hydrographic, geological, and chemical data as w ell as
functional habitat maps. These portals will provide access to m arine data o f a standard format
and know n quality and identify gaps in coverage.
The biological data portal, launched in February 2011 aims to visualize and redistribute
fragm ented m arine biological data for com plete maritime basins. The architecture o f the
system, partly based on the European O cean Biogeographic Inform ation System (EurOBIS),
is developed to meet the final objective o f EM O D net - that is to becom e an integrated and
inter-operable network o f systems o f European m arine observations and data
com m unications. The biological data portal is fully OGC com pliant, allowing com patibility
with OGC com pliant data servers (like Geoserver). This allow s integrating and visualizing
species observations served from different data providers and databases, and OGC com pliant
geographic maps. Through OGC com pliancy, the m arine biological data portal can visualize
also data products developed in the other them atic projects o f EM ODnet. The main
functionalities o f the portal include viewing a catalogue o f the data available, data querying,
data visualization and data downloading. In order to integrate m arine biological observation
data, taxonom ic standardization is a key element. The taxonom ic standardization allows to
detect and filter out spelling m istakes o f species nam es occurring in the contributing datasets,
solve issues or am biguities related to the nom enclature o f a species and to search and browse
data for aggregated groups. Therefore all species names are m atched w ith the W orld Register
o f M arine Species (W oRM S) and its European component, the European Register o f M arine
Species (ERM S).
The biological data portal o f EM O DN ET can be consulted at http://bio.em odnet.eu/portal.
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