GIS Projects for Coastal Management : a Link between INSPIRE and GMES

Patrick Houdry, Christophe De Dreuille, Patrice Couillaud

EADS S&DE, Labège (FR)

This paper presents how recent and on-going European projects take advantage of INSPIRE recommendations to provide innovative GIS solutions for Coastal Zones management, including a contribution to the GMES initiative.
INSPIRE guidelines led to :

• use of INSPIRE standards recommendations, allowing interoperability and sustainability of GIS databases and service components ;
• adoption of INSPIRE reference architecture, to federate databases and provide internet based services to the coastal community ;
• developing high level information services to support Coastal environment management.

Among other examples, we present the BRIDGE-IT project.
BRIDGE-IT develops innovative and generic technology, supporting the use of geographic information in various applications fields, in particular environmental management.
The BRIDGE-IT concept has two parts:

1. Provide innovative solutions to key issues that impair development of geographic information use.
2. Demonstrate the benefits brought by these innovations on real applications, in particular in the frame of environmental data management in Europe (INSPIRE) and for long term environment monitoring (GMES)

From this project, a reference architecture has been developed. It has the following characteristics :

• open architecture adopting Internet standards,
• normalized set of geographic components (OpenGIS Web Map Server, ISO metadata sets).

This architecture is a natural candidate to support geo-information based services. This is discussed through a presentation of a GMES Service Element (GSE) project, COASTWATCH, which is one of the 10 initial GMES services selected by ESA.
COASTWATCH aims at providing Europe-wide environmental information on coastal zones, from detailed information on coastal conditions (coastal water quality, wave exposure, coastal flood risks maps, etc.), up to high level indicators for the EEA and national/regional environment agencies.
Through its European dimension, COASTWATCH will both :

• rely on INSPIRE infrastructure facilitate access to environment data sources,
• provide the INSPIRE initiative with valuable environmental information at European scale.