Marine geographic information system for the exclusive economic zone

This article investigates the feasibility of creating an efficient marine geographic information system (CIS) model for various types of marine data (bathymetry, gravity, magnetic) collected by numerous national and international institutions over the past several decades in the Hawaiian Exclusive Economic Zone (EEL). The system has been developed with the objective of providing tools to perform tasks such as processing, integrating, archiving, managing, and analyzing different spatial marine data and displaying and generating thematic maps. The techniques involved in building the GIS, spatial marine data processing, data integration, 3D data structures, and animation, are also discussed. For the development of our marine GIS, various hardware systems, including PCs. workstations, plotters, scanners, and printers, as well as softwares such as Geologic Information Visualization (GIV). ARC/INFO Version 7 and its various modules, and image processing software tools such as Imagetool, XV, and Corel Draw were used. The data used for this project include bathymetric, gravity, and magnetic data collected in the part of the EEZ around the island of Kaho'olawe. This GIS model can be used as a prototype to develop a global marine GIS which will help in managing the oceans.

Keywords:

• ARC/INFO
• GUI
• Hawaiian EEZ
• marine GIS
• three‐dimensional model