The Marine Planning Portal was developed as a way of publishing a wide range of marine data required to facilitate the high level of stakeholder engagement required for marine planning. It was designed to provide a simple and convenient method for stakeholders to feed information about uses of the marine environment into the marine planning process.

The web site was structured to allow additional or updated layers to be added with the minimum of effort. The map update process is simplified through a map layer interface that is driven by a layer database. This single database also controls copyright, metadata, layer guidance notes, layer grouping, usage warning messages, popup information templates and map template production. The site provides a highly functional interface for publishing all forms of marine data relevant to the marine planning process and which can be readily expanded to meet future needs.

The web site was also setup to enable users to comment on the published data sets or on specific map features. All comments are stored in a database from which the data can be downloaded to a desktop comment database for further analysis and processing.

Further information from Crispin Flower.