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Marine Regions: towards a standard for georeferenced marine namesSimon Claus, Nathalie De Hauwere, Bart Vanhoorne, Francisco Hernandez & Jan MeesFlanders Marine Institute, Wandelaarkaai 7B-8400 Oostende, Belgiumsimon.claus@vliz.be, info@marineregions.orgAbstractGeographic Information Systems have become indispensable tools in managing and displaying marine data.However, a unique georeferenced standard of marine place names and areas is not available, hampering severalmarine geographic applications, such as the linking of these locations to databases for data integration. In order toimprove the current situation, we developed “Marine Regions”, a standard, hierarchical list of geographic names,linked to information and maps of the geographic location of these names, freely available athttp://www.marineregions.org. The objectives of Marine Regions are to improve access and clarity of the differentgeographic marine names such as seas, sandbanks, ridges and bays and to display univocally the boundaries of marinebiogeographic or managerial marine areas.IntroductionOne major step in organizing existing knowledge from integrated information systems is the development of appropriateclassification systems. When integrating, for example, quantitative and qualitative natural history anddistributional data, the use of geographical hierarchical schemas is essential (Reusser and Lee, 2011). The VLIMARGazetteer (Claus et al., 2006), a database with geographic, mainly marine, names such as seas, sandbanks, seamounts,ridges, bays or even standard sampling stations used in marine research was developed in order to create anhierarchical system for classifying marine geographic objects. It initially focussed on the Belgian Continental Shelfand the Southern Bight of the North Sea and helped solving several data management issues relating to, for example,place names changing over time or identical naming of different locations (Costello et al., 2006). Gradually moreregional and global geographic information has been added to VLIMAR, and combining this information with theMaritime Boundaries database (MARBOUND), representing the Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZ) of the world(Deckers and Vanden Berghe, 2006) led to the creation of Marine Regions.Structure & technologyAll geographic objects of the Marine Regions database have a unique identifier, called the MRGID (Marine RegionsGeographic Identifier), used for locating the geographic resources on the web. The different geographic objectsare determined by a placetype and coordinates. While the coordinates can be represented as different vectordata types (being a point, a polyline or a polygon), a placetype provides contextual information to the geographicobjects, for example a sea, a bay, a ridge, a sandbank or an undersea trench. Not only physical placetypes are considered,but also administrative placetypes, like countries, EEZ’s, fishing zones or territorial seas can be stored in thedatabase. The actual name of the geographic objects is stored as a different entity, allowing thus multiple naming forone geographic object (i.e. dealing with different languages). It is also possible to define different relations betweenthe geographic objects (part of, partly part of, adjacent to, similar to, streams through or flows out). Such a structureallows the user to group joint geographic units and to create a hierarchical classification of different places. Oncelogged in, geoobjects can be edited through the web interface of Marine Regions. If a point, a line or a polygon isavailable for a geographic object, the geographic position of the object will be visualised on an interactive web mappinginterface (Figure 1). The geographic web interface is based on the OpenLayers technology. All shapefiles containingthe polylines and polygons are uploaded to a local Geoserver installation, allowing the distribution of thegeographic objects as different Web Mapping Services (WMS) and Web Feature Services (WFS). The polygons ofthe different geographic classifications can be downloaded from the website as individual shapefiles.127