[Seavox] Sea Areas

[Roy Lowry]

Dear All,

At the recent IMDIS conference I spoke with Greg Reed (IODE co-chair) and Robert Ward (IHO) about the issues surrounding the publication of the updated IHO Sea Areas (IHO S-23 standard) that despite many efforts has been unchanged since 1953.  Robert suggested that it might be possible to publish a new edition on a regional basis, at least for the undisputed regions, and asked if we could formally express our need for this to IHO.

To this end I attach a draft letter expressing our need plus a spreadsheet put together by Greg comparing the current draft updated S-23 with the 1953 version.  I feel that the 2002 version is both a strong standard and forms a good 2 (occasionally 3) level hierarchy on which we could hang local names as required to build a sea area ontology.

I'm not sure what the IHO acceptance/publication timescales might be, but it may be necessary to implement the names (but NOT their spatial coverage specifications) under SeaVoX governance to resolve some of our burning issues such as the lack of Southern Ocean terms on timescales required for SeaDataNet.

I would appreciate your opinions on the following:

Comments on the letter text
Comments on the S-23 (2002) content
Any reasons why I should not work on a strategy to replace the C161 vocabulary (including fixing the code error Greg spotted) with a new hierarchical list group based on S-23 (2002) in a manner that won't break anything.  (I will of course run this past the list before doing anything....)  

Cheers, Roy.

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