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Purpose

Dealing with different names of geographic features or entities, VLIZ developed a standard, relational list of geographic names, known as a gazetteer, coupled with information on the geographic location of these features.

The purpose of the gazetteer is to improve access and clarity and to provide a visual interface of the different geographic, mainly marine names such as seas, sandbanks, ridges, bays or even standard sampling stations used in marine research. The geographic cover is global, however the gazetteer is focused on the Belgian Continental Shelf, the Scheldt Estuary and the Southern Bight of the North Sea.

Content

At the moment the VLIMAR gazetteer lists and provides geographical relations on more than 21000 marine geographic place names. Main contents are:
  • Regional
    • Placenames Southern Bight of the North Sea and Scheldt Estuary: (2666 records)
    • Black Sea
      • Bulgarian Antarctic Gazetteer (519 records)
      • GIS meteorology of Azov and Black Seas author Vladimir Belokopytov (1839 records)
    • Antarctica
      • Australian Antarctic Gazetteer (32 records)
      • SCAR Composite Gazetteer (8088 records)
  • Global
    • ASFA thesaurus (more info) (679 records)
    • Distribution records from WoRMS (3085 records)
    • Marine features
      • IHO-UOC GEBCO Gazetteer of undersea feature names (October 2002, May 2004, January 2010) (more info) (3509 records)
      • 23-3rd: Limits of Oceans and Seas, Special Publication 23, 3rd Edition 1953, published by the International Hydrographic Organization (more info) (194 records)
      • Others (389 records)
    • Marine limits
      • Exclusive Economic Zones (more info) 278 records
      • Large Marine Ecosystems of the World (more info) (64 records)
      • FAO Major Fishing Areas, UN Atlas of the Oceans (more info) (42 records)
      • Ecological geography of the Sea (Longhurst, 1998) (more info) (108 records)
      • Marine Ecoregions of the World, MEOW (Spalding et al., 2007) (more info) (305 records)
      • ICES Areas (more info) (13 records)
      • The SeaVoX Salt and Fresh Water Body Gazetteer (more info) (160 records)
The number of records is an approximate value based on the database on April 13th, 2010

Structure

The VLIMAR (VLIz MARine) gazetteer is served from a relational SQL server database where different geographic units can have one or more relations between each other. Every geographic unit or GeoObject has a certain placetype (country, sandbank, sea, estuary,...) and can have minimum, maximum and centroid coordinates. The actual names of the GeoObjects are put in the table GeoNames. By doing so, each GeoObject can have more than one name (for example different languages of the same GeoObject). The relation between different GeoObjects is contained in the table Relations. The relation between two GeoObjects (FirstGeoObject and SecondGeoObject) is defined with a certain Relationtype. Examples of Relationtypes are ‘part of, adjacent to, streams through or flows out’. Such a structure allows the user to group joint geographic units.

OpenLayers & GeoServer

If either a shape, a bounding box or a center point is available for a geographic unit of the VLIMAR gazetteer, a dynamic map will appear. The geographic interface is based on the OpenLayers technology. All shapes are uploaded to a local GeoServer installation.

Applications

Not only is the VLIMAR gazetteer valuable as a search tool on its own, but lots of applications can be derived from it, such as linking different datasets, species distributions or sampling campaigns with geographic entities from the gazetteer. Each GeoObject can have a certain context. This allows us to query a defined group of geographic entities. For example to query all the geographic entities of the Belgian Continental shelf linked to a project that is carrying out research on these geographic places. Applications of the VLIMAR gazetteer so far are:

  • MARBEF Data System:
    • The gazetteer integrates all different placenames used in the datasystem of the Marine Biodiversity and Ecosystem Functioning EU Network of Excellence.

  • Scheldemonitor:
    • The gazetteer integrates all different placenames used in the datasystem developed for all information related to the Scheldt river and estuary

  • World database of Proseriata and Kalyptorhyncha:
    • Biogeographic data of this database of marine flatworm species are linked with the VLIMAR gazetteer.

  • World Porifera Database:
    • The localities of the holotypes of the world Porifera database are linked with the Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZ's) of the VLIMAR gazetteer.

  • World database of Cumacea:
    • Biogeographic data of this database of marine Cumacea are linked with the VLIMAR gazetteer.

    Download

    The website of VLIMAR also provides the possibility to download shapefiles that were created at the Flanders Marine Institute (VLIZ) such as shapefiles from the IHO Sea Areas and from the FAO fishing Areas. Shapfiles from the Exclusive Economic Zones of the world, developped at VLIZ can be downloaded here.