Esri Ireland GIS Case Studies, GIS and the Marine Institute

The Marine Institute

Industry

Marine businesses and related activities.

The Client

The Marine Institute's role is twofold; to support existing marine businesess and related activities; and to support research, technology, development and innovation in the marine area.

The Challenge

The Marine Institute collects a wealth of scientific data regarding Ireland's marine environment. This includes oceanogaphic, environmental, biological and chemical data. The majority of the datasets were stored and managed entirely independently of each other leading to major difficulties.

Solution

Esri Ireland worked with the Institute to enable them to build a spatially enabled data warehouse. This was required to support the existing analytical desktop systems and also provide functionality to support online requests for data received via their intranet and the internet.

Benefits

With the Marine Data Repository researchers can now create a single map-based query which delivers all the necessary data in a single transaction.

Summary

Working closely with the Marine Institute and Fujitsu Services, Esri Ireland initially developed a prototype data warehouse to demonstrate the feasibility of managing such large volumes of spatial information.

Based on the success of the prototype the Institute decided to build a fully functional data warehouse that will initially hold an estimated 30 million records of marine data.Called the Marine Data Repository, the data warehouse stores the masses of data collected by the Institute's operational research programmes and makes data available for analysis internally and externally via their website: www.marine.ie. Now more analysis is conducted on "raw" datasets and more complex queries are supported by the system,for example what would be the effects of sea temperature fluctuations on fish stocks in a particular geographic area.

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Client Testimonial

“This new solution is a huge step forwards and saves time and effort as stakeholders can share and access marine data much more readily”

Paul Synnott
Country Manager
Esri Ireland