Safeguarding, integrating and disseminating knowledge on exploited marine ecosystems: The ecoscope

Abstract

Ecosystem Approach to Fisheries (EAF) is an application of sustainable development concepts to exploited marine resources management. In particular, this approach aims to improve decision making by facilitating information and knowledge sharing among the different stakeholders in the domain. The CRHMT in Sèete studies Mediterranean and tropical fisheries by taking into account the related ecosystems and their elements. Informational resources (IR) needed for an ecosystem approach to manage these fisheries are collected at a global scale: from local databases as well as from several sources distributed around the world. While Internet enables IR sharing, IR discovery still remains complicated because of their heterogeneity (from a thematic, technical and semantic point of view). The challenge for IR management in this domain, like in many others, is to set up an information system which facilitates (online) IR discovery, access and, if possible, certain treatments (like a simple subset or aggregating data from one or different sources...) through dedicated portals. The use of standards is crucial for such systems interoperability. Indeed, standards facilitate external users understanding of what kinds of data are available in the different sources and how they can get them. We present an information system which aims to satisfy these needs by complying with the main standards of the domain (for metadata, ontologies, knowledge and spatial information management). Attention will be paid on using a generic approach to set up an architecture which can be reused in other case studies.