The Marine Management Organisation (MMO) is responsible for managing planning in the intertidal and marine environment. The planning process is managed by licences for construction, dredging and disposal within UK waters (up to 12 nautical miles).

The objective of this project was to process licence data from their legacy database to improve the accuracy of the spatial information. This was completed using a series of data validation rules.

For sites with no spatial object, the location description was used to geocode each license so that they could be analysed spatially.

In addition, many licences require survey data to be collated and supplied to the MMO. A list of keywords were identified and used to tag the survey metadata to improve searches for similar surveys within a specified radius. The keywords significantly improve the results returned and allow data to be compared over time.

Further information from Claire Lush.