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11 th International Symposium for GIS and Computer Cartography for Coastal Zones Managementsions become available. Another vein of commentary revolves around information that was not accessible throughthe search utility that participants would have liked to be able to view and manipulate during the session. This bringsthe conversation back to ‘step one’ in the COINAtlantic Chain for Information Access that deals with informationbeing made available through WMS and KML files that is distributed using standard OGC techniques. This is anongoing challenge. Another series of comments noted that participants would like to see a wider variety of toolsbeing demonstrated during training sessions, including the use of ArcGIS and associated file types. This currentlyfalls somewhat outside of the area of interest of COINAtlantic’s training goals because it does not fall within thegeneral COINAtlantic philosophy described in the “Chain for Information Access” and accepted ‘open’ geospatialtechniques and standards.Figure 1. The COINAtlantic Search Utility (CSU) interface. Users enter search terms in the top-left corner, Google is searchedfor related spatial files, and users can select a result and display it on the map.Sharing coastal information in the futurePowerful open tools for analysis of environmental data now exist, such as GRASS GIS (Neteler, 2012), however,the current online mapping tools are often for display and simple querying only. Coastal decision makers need to notonly display oceans data but also analyze the data and the environment around it. The Open Geospatial Consortium'srecent Web Processing Service specification allows for complex analysis over the Internet using open tools in theback-end such as GRASS GIS (Raghavan et al., 2011). It is conceivable that the COINAtlantic Search Utility couldbe enhanced to leverage the WPS standard and allow for complex coastal analysis through an easy to use interface.ConclusionOpen tools and open standards are now allowing coastal decision makers to easily publish, locate, and analyze relatedspatial information. The Atlantic Coastal Zone Information Steering Committee and Gateway Geomatics areworking together to provide readily available tools for the oceans community. In the upcoming future, challengesmay exist as these tools are based on constantly changing and innovative technology.122