Arctic GIS Workshop Poster Abstract

22-24 January 2001
Bell Harbor International Conference Center
Seattle, Washington

Geospatial Information Management for Oceans Integrated Management Processes in the Arctic

Marta Wojnarowska and Sara Melnyk
Oceans Program Division, Fisheries and Oceans Canada, Winnipeg, MB R3T 2N6 Canada, Phone: 204/984-2522, Fax: 204/984-2403, wojnarowskam@dfo-mpo.gc.ca; melnyks@dfo-mpo.gc.ca

In 1997 Canada's Oceans Act came into force. The goal of the Act is to provide tools for integrated oceans management. Data and information are essential building blocks in integrated management processes. An approach to managing the spatial information within the Oceans Sector is the ongoing development of the Spatial Data Warehouse (SDW). The Spatial Data Warehouse is an assembly of geographical data at various scales and geographical extents such as circumpolar, national, territorial, and settlement regions. Metadata (descriptions of the data) is also stored in SDW. To facilitate organization and access to the SDW, GeoArctic Spatial Data Manager software (GeoArctic SDM eSDM) is used. This software allows for the development of data categories and flexible metadatabases. Categorized datasets stored in the spatial data warehouse are accessed and loaded to ArcView GIS through the GeoArctic SDM viewer. The software also allows for the publishing of the datasets on the Internet.