Ines Falcao
Engineer
Portuguese Task Group for the Extension of the Continental Shelf
Portugal

Biography
Inês Falcão, certified geomatic engineer, received her Master of Science in Geomatic Engineering from Faculty of Sciences of the Lisbon University in 2012. Inês has been involved in information technology projects as researcher and developer. Presently, Inês works in the SNIMar project “Preparation of integrated geographic information for marine and coastal water management” promoted by the Task Group for the Extension of the Continental Shelf, collaborating in the development of a Marine Spatial Data Infrastructure. Inês has particular interest in programming and web mapping activities and her last work experiences were related with IT consulting and INSPIRE matters."

Abstract
"Collaborative SNIMar Thesaurus" Web Application

Co-Authors:
Eduardo Pascoal, Engineer, Portuguese Task Group for the Extension of the Continental Shelf
Ricardo Silva, Engineer, Portuguese Task Group for the Extension of the Continental Shelf

The SNIMar project, “Preparation of integrated geographic information for marine and coastal water management", is a predefined project of the EEA grants, which has as main purpose the development of a Marine Spatial Data Infrastructure that will assimilate the large diversity of marine data that exists throughout all marine institutions and to increase capacity of assessing and predicting environmental status in marine waters. The SNIMar SDI will bring together and catalog all the marine information in a central node which categorization will allow a richer and more useful search. For this purpose, a metadata profile was developed for the SNIMar project. This profile, compliant with the INSPIRE metadata specifications, was optimized to increase the effectiveness of the SNIMar Geoportal search tool and to reduce the waiting time for obtaining high quality thematic information. Since the use of common vocabularies is an important prerequisite to achieve consistency and to solve problems of ambiguities associated with data markup, such optimization is based on metadata enrichment through well-defined and standardized keywords assignment. In order to group those keywords in a thesaurus especially developed for the marine environment, the collaboration of partner institutions is crucial to define and adjust the thesaurus to their spatial datasets reality ensuring the coherence of the SNIMar metadata. Thus, with the development of a web application named "Collaborative SNIMar Thesaurus", based on the folksonomy concept, is intended to streamline communication between stakeholders and to achieve consensus on keywords definition for the marine environment. This solution foresees the dynamic creation and maintenance of the thesaurus through participation in the generation and edition of terms fulfilling the rules set out in the application. Once the SNIMar thesaurus is multidisciplinary, its development requires special attention on semantic aspects and on the assessment and acceptance process of the vocabulary proposed by registered members. The main goal of this solution is to provide online querying of recommended keywords to support the creation of metadata properly tagged according to the SNIMar sets of terms. Being an open source application, it allows an easier adjustment to other realities.