The long-term strategic goal of the IODE ICAN (International Coastal Atlas Network) project is to encourage and help facilitate the development of digital atlases of the global coast based on the principle of distributed, high-quality data and information. These atlases can be local, regional, national and international in scale. ICAN aims to achieve this by sharing knowledge and experience among atlas developers in order to find common solutions for coastal web atlas development whilst ensuring maximum relevance and added value for the users.User interactions between CWA developers and hosts and their target audiences have been explored since the beginning of the ICAN project, through workshops, and practically through the development of the various atlases by the membership of ICAN. We believe that the wealth of experience gained within ICAN should be made available to new and existing atlas developers in order to provide practical guidance on how best to interact with atlas audiences.This hand book was compiled by gathering information from ten atlas developers as well as extracting relevant information from ICAN workshop reports. This information is summarised and analysed here leading to two sets of recommendations, one focused on the development of new atlases and the other focused on how to maintain interactions with audiences of already developed atlases. The handbook will therefore allow both new and established CWA developers and hosts to benefit from best practice examples as well as learn from mistakes made in the past, in order to increase capacity to successfully interact with user communities and target audiences, while managing coastal and marine data and information in a user friendly way. The final product is a resource that hopes to complement and link to a variety of OceanTeacher activities, support IODE training in courses, and it will be made available within the OceanTeacher Digital Library, thereby being of value to all who manage and present marine data and information. |
