A Metadata Service for Integrated Management of Knowledges Related to Coastal Areas

The research outlined in this paper is part of a wider research program named SYSCOLAG (Coastal and LAGoonal SYStems in Languedoc-Roussillon area, France) dedicated to sustainable coastal management. The main objective of this program is to build up a communication infrastructure to improve the exchange of information and knowledge between the various scientific disciplines involved in the research. In order to ensure the sharing of resources without affecting the autonomy and independance of the partners, we propose a three-level infrastructure (resources, federation and knowledge access) based on a metadata service (using ISO 19115 standard for geographic information metadata) completed by a common vocabulary (ontology).The Syscolag research program (COastal and LAGoonal SYStems) is funded by Languedoc Roussillon authority.Julien Barde is currently a Ph.D. student in Computer Science at the LIRMM (the Computer Science, Robotic and Microelectronic Laboratory of the University of Montpellier II, France) under the guidance of Thérèse Libourel and Pierre Maurel since 2002. He works for a research program of Integrated Coastal Management to improve knowledge sharing between the stakeholders of Languedoc Roussillon coastal area. He has received his engineer/M.Sc. degrees in Oceanology Sciences and Spatial Information Treatment from the National Superior Agronomic School of Rennes (ENSAR, Brittany, France) in 2000 and 2001. He has experience in Computer Science, Remote sensing, GIS and oceanology.Thérèse Libourel is a Senior Lecturer in Computer Science from the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers (CNAM), currently at the LIRMM (the Computer Science, Robotic and Microelectronic Laboratory of the University of Montpellier II, France) since 1994. She holds a Ph.D. and a habilitation thesis in Computer Science from the University of Montpellier II (France). Among others, her research interests are oriented towards object oriented design, reuse of software components, object oriented databases and evolution, and data models for spatial and temporal information systems.Pierre Maurel is a research engineer in Cemagref (France). He received his Diploma on Agronomy Engineering from ESAP high school (France) in 1986 and his M.Sc. on quantitative geography in 1990 from Avignon University (France). In the past, he performed research and teaching in satellite image processing and GIS for environmental and water applications. His current scientific interests include the development of methods for the design of multi-partners geographic information systems, the use of metadata within Spatial Data Infrastructures and the integration of Geographic Information technologies to support public participation in the field of Integrated River Basin Management (HarmoniCOP European project).