Web-based GIS for coastal zone management in New Brunswick

All levels of federal, provincial, and local governments have various interests in the management of different coastal resources in New Brunswick. In order to balance the competitive uses of the limited coastal resources, it is desirable to carry on a practice of Coastal Zone Management (CZM). CZM refers to the integrated use and management of coastal resources among different departments.; This research project first examines the current work of selected coastal decision-makers, and investigates existing coastal development policies and coastal related databases in New Brunswick. Based on the data and GIS functionality requirements of a selected CZM application, a prototype is developed to manage and analyze diverse coastal data in a distributed network environment using Web-based GIS products. This proposed system could be regarded as a supporting tool for general CZM applications.; Since CARIS Spatial Fusion is selected as the Internet Map Server to build up the above-proposed prototype, the suitability of this new Internet GIS product to CZM is evaluated in this research. The software installation, Web-application set up, functionality and some performance issues are tested to certain extent. The limitations and the architecture of this software product are also analyzed.; To encourage the further development of CARIS Spatial Fusion and enhance its on-line functionality, this research project also develops an internet-based tool using Java programming. Two Web-based functions, which are buffering around point and line features and overlay analysis based on user-defined areas, are designed and implemented. The OpenGIS Simple Feature Specification for SQL is implemented in this developed tool to store the spatial features.