A Thematic Centre to share geo-information on Mediterranean and Bleak Sea coasts within an UNESCO Research Project

Valpreda Edi*, Simeoni Umberto**, Rotunno Michele*

*ENEA -National Agency for New Technologies, Energy and the Environment- Env. Dept. (IT)
**Ferrara University - Earth Science Dept. (IT)

The Authors, which belong to ENEA - Environment Department and University of Ferrara, act as partners in the UNESCO Research Project "Vulnerability and resilience assessment of coastal zone in Mediterranean and Black Sea areas relates to the forecast sea level rise for management purposes" (Project n.515). Among other accomplishments, one of the main purposes of the Project is the creation of Permanent Observation Thematic Centres (POC), in each involved Country, that will be coordinated by the Italian Centre (located in Ferrara University). The POC's aim to uphold the exchange of data and results from researches on coastal environments state (referred to Project themes) among 23 countries and 52 Research Centres that are involved in the Project. To become a stable chance, the Italian Centre will be helped by local and national public administrations taking part in the project.
ENEA is directly involved in the Italian POC increasing and its activities improvement.
ENEA (as component of GI-CLAN ) will extend the POC's objective, acting in the UNESCO Italian POC, to improve the access and sharing of coastal information knowledge accessibility to sustain and apply a common approach in metadata creation among project partners. The final aim will be an harmonized web portal creation, involving the POC's network, to let metadata available and, when possible, also the features, (referred to coastal areas) that will be created and furnished by each project partners. To achieve this goal also training actions involving Project partners will be designed.
The initiative will be administrated by ENEA, inside Italian POC, that will become part of analogous initiatives in Europe (i.e The National Geo-Portal from Italian Ministry of Environment). Furthermore, to give add value to the geographical information of the UNESCO initiative and reveal its meaning while making it available to the different levels of users, ENEA intends to answer to the next e-contentPlus call, proposing a Project for the harmonisation of datasets belonging to coastal risk assessment and management matter.