Talk:NOKIS - Information Infrastructure for the North and Baltic Sea

The NOKIS website is not operational anymore. The marine data infrastructure in Germany was reshuffled in 2014, see below.

In Germany an integrated national marine and coastal information system was set up in 2014 within the co-operative project "Marine Data Infrastructure (MDI-DE)". Coastal and marine data collected by 11 Federal and State agencies are made available by OGC (Open Geospatial Consortium) compliant Web services and documented with metadata according to the ISO standard. The new MDI-DE portal serves as central entry point for data and information from the German coastal zone and the adjacent marine waters. This facilitates intersectoral views of resources by providing technological solutions of networking and distributed data management. The benefit of hosting the data locally is that the data from different sources can be merged in almost any way, custom-made compositions of thematic data layers can be compiled without touching the data itself. Each participating agency or institute operates a node which consists of a few basic components: services to provide the data, metadata and a database. For the provision of spatial data, the OGC has developed a number of open and international standards. The Web Map Service (WMS) to generate and visualize digital maps in the Web and the Web Feature Service (WFS) to download the data in an interoperable format such as GML (Geography Markup Language). The underlying database needs to support these services. After thus ensuring the data distribution, the last piece of the puzzle is the corresponding metadata which are harvested from the different local nodes and are provided through a standardized Catalogue Service for the Web (CSW) interface. Beyond the basic services such as WMS and WFS, a Web Processing Service (WPS) for data analysis was implemented. MDI-DE represents not only a state-of-the-art spatial data infrastructure; it also aspires to lose the ‘spatial-only’ attribute and includes other related data into this distributed data source. The future WebServices provided by MDI-DE will support system analysis applications related to coastal engineering, spatial planning, nature conservation, science and ecology.