ICAN Workshop 4, Trieste, Italy

The International Coastal Atlas Network (ICAN) is a newly-founded informal group of organizations who have been meeting over the past two years to scope and implement data interoperability approaches to coastal web atlases (CWAs). The mission/strategic aim of ICAN is to share experiences and to find common solutions to CWA development (e.g., user and developer guides, handbooks and articles on best practices, information on standards and web services, expertise and technical support directories, education, outreach, and funding opportunities, etc.), while ensuring maximum relevance and added value for the end users. This includes the development of controlled vocabularies and ontologies for the data and tools resident within CWAs.

Workshop 4 in Trieste will further the strategic planning, governance, global reference, and community-building work of ICAN. We will continue work on our atlas interoperability proof-of-concept, which uses ontologies, as well as Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) standards, namely Catalogue Services for the Web (CSW), with registered Web Map Services (WMS).

Event Dates: 16-20 November 2009
Event Location: Adriatico Guest House, International Centre for Theoretical Physics, UNESCO University, Trieste, Italy

Preliminary Objectives:

• A focus on users: better knowledge of our users, their needs, and on continued inventory, assessment, and evaluation of atlases.
• Revisiting the main recommendations of the ICAN 1 workshop, picking up where we left off there in 2006 and addressing the recommendations that have not yet received adequate attention. One recommendation was the needed emphasis on users, already mentioned above. Others would include evaluating atlas impact, and developing analysis and decision-support tools in atlases.

• Continued progress on our ontology and semantic interoperability work, but with an eye also toward articulating the benefits of semantic interoperability at a broader scale, to non-specialists. In this we look forward to the advice and assistance of MMI and SeaDataNet, who have already developed conceptual framework documents in this area. Both groups plan to have representation at ICAN 4.
  o A small “workshop within a workshop” for atlas administrators on how to become a new node in interoperability prototype.
  o Strategize on developing further improvements of all those nodes (according to the SEIS principles of sharing information for multiple purposes, using data and systems that are accessible and interoperable).
  o Discuss further work needed on partnerships, infrastructure and data exchange formats, all with the overall objective of enabling the nodes to share and communicate with each other, avoid duplication, and streamline information management.

• A small “workshop within a workshop” general atlas users, how to function effectively in CWAs, especially as the technology continues to change.
• Presentations on emerging atlases in European countries (especially the Mediterranean) that are making themselves relevant through policy, environmental and socio-economic indicator work and related themes.
• Roll out final implementation structures on governance (including formal procedures for receiving new members), strategic planning, and technical activities so that ICAN can formally incorporate as an organization.
• Coordination of research agenda and proposal teams for submissions to the National Science Foundation.
• EEA is also scheduling at this venue their meeting of the European National Reference Centers, concurrently with the ICAN 4 workshop

Check out the cool calendar feature below!