Marine Scotland Information is Live

Marine Scotland launched the latest component of its open data network recently . Marine Scotland Information is a portal that provides context and background information on data being released. It is the gathering point of map layers from National Marine Planning interactive (NMPi), data sets from the existing Marine Scotland interactive (MSi) and data from Marine Scotland's data publishing portal. The Marine Scotland Open Data Network now consist of three tools to access and explore data and information:

• National Marine Plan interactive (http://maps.marine.gov.scot) – map layers supporting marine planning, and providing information about Scotland’s seas
• This site! - Marine Data for Scotland (http://data.marine.gov.scot) – downloadable reports and data files for a variety of activities. All datasets have citeable DOI, and additional metadata.
• And now Marine Scotland Information (http://marine.gov.scot) – gathering all the map and data resources, and placing them in context. Providing background information in themes that are aligned with Scottish Governments vision for healthy, clean and safe, biologically diverse, and productive Scottish Seas.

The New portal replaces existing parts of the Marine Scotland website – namely the individual information pages on map layers from NMPi , and the web site pages from Marine Scotland interactive (MSi). These two resources were initially built as early data sharing tools that provided tailored functions which are now embedded within the new Marine Scotland Information portal, along with added flexibility for creating new content and automatically linking the maps, and data site content into the portal, using web services.