Cdr. Rui Manuel
Baptista
Head of Data Center
Portuguese Hydrographic Office
Portugal

Biography
Rui Baptista is a Portuguese navy officer (commander) specialized in Hydrography and Oceanography. He is stationed at the Portuguese Hydrographic Office since 1987. Being a Hydrographer, he began by doing field works related with bathymetric surveys. In 1996 he started to work at the Data Center where he have made severalcontributes, among others, to develop and maintain the existing Spatial Data Infrastructure on Marine Environment.In 2009 he became head of the Data Center.

Abstract
The Marine Spatial Data Infrastructure at the Portuguese Hydrographic Office

The hydrographic Institute manages an observation network of oceanographic stations that has been developed since 1935. Up to 2000 data were registered on paper (tide gauges) or was archived in the equipment (solid memory). Today the network comprises several buoys, meteorological stations,HF radar stations and several tide gauges with automatic continuous data transmission. With the technologic advance and the new equipment, data transmission near real time becomes true. All this data is automatically quality controlled and load into databases and, consequentially, some is accessible through the portal immediately to all of us. Other important mission is the publication of official nautical Navigation Cartography for which IHPT conducts highly precision sea bottom surveys with specific sonar equipment. These published nautical charts result from the compilation of millions of measured sounds collected by navy hydrographic ship and kept on a regular database. Beyond that, other themes of data collect at IHPT are Marine Geology and Chemistry, which,together, contribute to a major database on marine environmental of Portuguese Ocean and Coastal waters.

The implementation of the Inspire directive, mandatory in the case of the IHPT, brought the need to establish new processes and services to the already existent project IDAMAR at the oceanographic and hydrographic Data Center, responsible for maintaining the Spatial Data Infrastructure for the Marine Environment.