Adapting an enhanced multiple database integration and update capability to support coastal operations

Coastal zone analysts require high-resolution geospatial information beyond the production capability of most information providers. While organizations such as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the National Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA) are moving toward standardization, they continue to produce a plethora of separate products characterized by varying map scales, accuracies, resolutions, coverages, and thematic content. These multiple disparate overlapping data products must be deconflicted and integrated (a.k.a., conflated) to form a unified foundation. Since the maritime community can now obtain high-resolution aerial imagery and hydrographic surveys at affordable costs, they can add value to existing NOAA or NIMA foundation data to help maintain data currency, while tailoring environmental and geo-spatial products to better suit their needs. To increase the resolution and fidelity of baseline products such as Digital Nautical Chart, geospatial analysts must be equipped to integrate information and resolve conflicts and redundancies. This process is dependent on business rules that consider coastal parameters and processes. Rules are applied to reduce a highly variable region into sub-areas that are easier to consider individually. The rules, which consider forces shaping a coast, are used to automatically integrate and reconcile multiple digital vector sources. The procedure involves a coastal classification system combined with a littoral logical data model and dynamic conflation and updating paradigms to build a unified and current, high-resolution littoral feature foundation database.