A geo-database for potentially polluting marine sites and associated risk index

Abstract

The increasing availability of geospatial marine data provides an opportunity for hydrographic offices to contribute to the identification of Potentially Polluting Marine Sites (PPMS). To adequately manage these sites, a PPMS Geospatial Database (GeoDB) application was developed to collect and store relevant information suitable for site inventory and geo-spatial analysis. The benefits of structuring the data to conform to the Universal Hydrographic Data Model (IHO S-100) and to use the Geographic Mark-Up Language (GML) for encoding are presented. A storage solution is proposed using a GML-enabled spatial relational database management system (RDBMS). In addition, an example of a risk index methodology is provided based on the defined data structure. The implementation of this example was performed using scripts containing SQL statements. These procedures were implemented using a cross-platform C++ application based on open-source libraries and called PPMS GeoDB Manager