ABSTRACT
There are many different types of users of coastal zone information, from the casual user who may only want to browse, to the sophisticated user who makes frequent use of mapping and demands continuous improvement. These user communities are diverse in the topics they address, covering such areas as Local and Central Government, environmental and economic analysis, and also increasingly leisure use. A common mapping framework that bridges the land-sea divide allows users to build applications and decision-making tools necessary to promote the shared use of such data throughout all levels of Government, the private and non-profit sectors and academia. A consistent framework also serves to stimulate growth, potentially resulting in significant savings in data collection, enhanced use of data and assist better decision-making. As well as a physical division, the land-sea divide has also, for many spatial data suppliers, acted as a limit to their area of responsibility, or formed a data product boundary. As a result users wanting to model the diverse aspect of the coastal zone across this divide have had to identify, obtain and combine separate datasets to provide the data coverage they require. The combination process must resolve integration problems resulting from the differing projections, scale of capture and other specification issues of the source datasets. This process can be time consuming, result in inconsistent data and can cause a hindrance to the management of a particularly sensitive environmental zone. This chapter will look at the technical issues involved with the integration of data across the land-sea divide and identify means for resolving these. Examples within this chapter have been drawn from the work done by Ordnance Survey of Great Britain, United Kingdom Hydrographic Office and the British Geological Survey on integrated coastal zone mapping project (ICZMap) (Gomm, 2001).
