CoastBase is a project aiming to design the European virtual coastal and marine data warehouse, is supported by the European Commission (DG Information Society) within the Fifth Framework Programme "Research and Technology Development". The CoastBase project was launched in January 2000 by a multidisciplinary consortium of eleven partners from different European countries. The CoastBase client (based on HTML and Java) provides uniform, multilingual and interactive access to all CoastBase services. The CoastBase architecture can be divided into three types of services; - virtual catalogue (localize information on the basis of meta data),
- data access and manipulation (transforming and aggregating the data),
- feedback (provider feedback, commenting and upload of own products).
This architecture is designed to be modular and open, allowing future inclusion of new data manipulation functions or connections to other information sources. The ultimate aim is to improve marine and coastal research, assessment, policy making and cooperation along Europe's coasts. |