CoastBase - The Virtual European Coastal and Marine Data Warehouse -CoastBase- An open system architecture for integrated, distributed coastal and marine information search and access

The objective of the project CoastBase was to develop an automatically updated electronic system architecture providing multilingual search and access facilities to distributed information sources and a European coastal database ‘CoastBase’, holding European level products as indicators, maps and reports. Technical modules convert the content, check on quality, secure user access and aggregate the information. A Communication and Feedback mechanism among European authorities was implemented. This automatically provides information sources with details of resulting products coming from their information and allow them to comment on the data handling, enhancing the European involvement of authorities at local up to European level. A prototype Virtual European Coastal and Marine Data Warehouse was developed.