[Seavox] "Sea Areas"

[Roy Lowry]

Dear All,

Attached is a concept map of a proposed nucleus list of "Sea Areas" (defined something like named subsets of the Earth's surface of interest to the oceanographic data management domain for use as data discovery keywords).  Consequently, it includes chunks of land to provide context for inland waters that are increasingly falling into the oceanographic data centre sphere of interest).

The terms included come from four sources as indicated by the bubble colour.  The pale blue terms bear a striking resemblance to the unpublished IHO 2002 S23 revision.  The red/orange terms are the so-called ROSCOP extensions to C23.  The green terms are terms I've added to cover, with geographical context, freshwater bodies  that have been brought to my attention as being of interest to 'oceanographic data centres'.  The purple term is the cause of all the controversy in IHO and the reason why S23 hasn't been revised since 1953.

The terms are organised into an ontology that may be navigated by starting at 'World' then following the arrows.

My plan would be to implement these terms as a single list in the vocabulary server with the relationships between terms as shown by the arrows.  Further terms may be added as required, providing they are proposed together with the terms to which they should be mapped (ie broader areas that enclose the new term or overlap with it).  This new list would replace the existing C16 vocabulary used in SeaDataNet. Naturally mappings to the new list would be provided wherever possible.

However, I plan to go further than this and set up a spatial database holding a polygon corresponding to each term that would be accessible through WFS and/or WMS.  Service URLs would be included in the term definition field.

Initially, I would like the governance group to consider the following questions:

(1) Are there any reasons why this plan shouldn't go ahead?
(2) Should 'Sea of Japan' be included as a term under SeaVoX governance?
(3) Should we stick with the local spellings such Jawa Sea and Tai-Wan Strait?  If not, which terms should we change?

Any other comments on the terms included would be welcome.  

Note that I would rather avoid requests for additional terms at this stage until I get something together.  

The concept map is also available in CMAP XML export format if anyone needs it.

Cheers, Roy.

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