Coastal Web Atlas Implementation

Introduction: Getting Started

For those embarking on a coastal web atlas (CWA) project, there are many factors to consider in the early stages of design and planning. Primary among these is being knowledgeable about the needs and capabilities of the CWA’s user community, and designing the contents of the CWA to meet those needs. The purpose of this chapter is to provide CWA developers and managers with a range of considerations for implementing various components of a coastal web atlas. Each CWA situation and audience will be different so there are few hard and fast rules to follow, but it is hoped that the range of design considerations presented here will improve awareness of the issues CWA designers face and provide pragmatic advice on potential paths to take.

In terms of getting started, the first recommendation to CWA project planners is to set aside time at the beginning of the project to thoroughly consider the goals of the project, the nature of the audience it seeks to serve, and the long term plans for project support, both technical and financial. Discussion of these issues early in the project will improve the odds that major problems can be avoided.

O’Dea et al. (2007) have an excellent overview of critical considerations upon which project designers should reflect. These considerations (summarized below) are posed as questions that when answered and acted upon by a CWA project team should help form the basis of a successful project

Maps

As stated in Chapter 2, a map area is at the heart of any coastal web atlas, as this is where the main geographic and thematic scope of the atlas is showcased to users. To some extent one of the early decisions a CWA design team must make is to determine how dominant the maps portion of their project will be. For some atlas projects the interactive map is the central functional focus of the website. In others, it is simply a portion of the atlas content offerings. Neither approach is faulty, and either can lead to a feature- and information-rich resource for CWA users. From a technical standpoint, there are many different methods by which a host can feature maps in a web atlas. These range in complexity of implementation and have different implications for amount of effort involved for atlas hosts. There is also a range of options for the distribution of computing workload between the atlas web server and the client browser of the atlas users. In this section, we cover the typical range of map implementations and lay out the pros and cons of each option.