Integrating portal

1
Keiran Millard 1, Francisco Hernandez 2, Edward
Vanden Berghe 2   1 Engineering Systems
Management, HR Wallingford Ltd Email
k.millard_at_hrwallingford.co.uk   2 Flanders Marine
Data and Information Centre, Flanders Marine
Institute Improved management of the marine
environment requires integration of biological
data with data from other sources. XML technology
can be regarded as providing a consistent 'data
grammar' that marine biologists, chemists and
physical oceanographers - in addition to
instrument and software manufacturers - can use
to bring different kinds of marine data together
for meaningful analysis.  The IOC of UNESCO has
looked to harmonise the application of XML to the
marine community through its Marine XML
initiative. One project under this umbrella is
part-funded by the European Commission. This
paper reports on the work undertaken by the EU
marinexml project in developing xml-schema based
on the geographic mark-up language (GML)
developed by the OpenGIS Consortium (OGC) . This
GML application schema can be used for data
interchange within and across the marine
community.  Recent years have seen much
activity in the convergence of protocols for data
exchange, in particular the harmonisation and
adoption of OGC standards within the ISO TC211
(ISO19000) series of standards. The adoption of
GML as ISO 19136 means that the marine community
no longer has to make a choice between the ISO or
OGC path. Given this convergence, the new
challenge is to create the tools to support the
interoperability of data models across
overlapping domains.  MarineXML has concluded
on concepts and implementation strategies for the
implementation of GML application schemas in
overlapping domains. In particular, the use of a
Feature Type Catalog as a Web Services enabled
registry, able to support emerging libraries of
component schema building blocks as well as
higher-order semantics of relationships between
Feature Types. Three test-bed applications have
been defined one of these deals with
biogeography combining species distribution
records with information on the physical state of
the environment. Any activity of this kind must
strike a balance between maintaining the
community view on the data and proving a view on
the data that enables it to be understood by
other communities including the technologies
supported by these communities. We here
present a possible scenario that demonstrates the
interoperability of standards used by different
marine communities.
xml formats
Floodworks model data
Tisbe biodiversity data
OBIS
Operational network
Darwin
XML
DIGIR provider/ webservice
FTP / HTTP
common standards
MarineXML
GML
shared applications
Integrating portal
Web mapping
SVG
OGC