Integrated display and communication of information towards stakeholders. NAMIBIE: an application for the integrated management of the Thau lagoon and its watershed

NAMIBIE (a French acronym for I ntegrated Multimedia Navigator Within Coastal Environment Data Bases) is a specific tool which first concept has been established by Ifremer and has been developed by an association between research in the field of coastal environment, innovation in the field of new information and communication technologies and services in the field of coastal integrated management and impact studies. The objectives of this tool i s to facilitate research, direct access and d isplay of relevant multimedia coastal integrated data and information according to an interactive, widely opened and play-full interface. The principles are based upon the fact that sustainable decision making needs an optimised understanding of coastal processes and better consultation between actors. In this purpose the development of the tool has considered that the end user should and could be free to look after the data and the information he needs for a particular site or environment of interest and for a specific ICZM question according to easy navigation interfaces. That is why the NAMIBIE concept is based upon : - a c oherent 3D representation o f the coasts (i.e. from watersheds to continental shelf and deep sea), which consider a coherent DEM from land to sea and textural representation of the environment by using satellite imagery textural displays, - a 3D navigator which allows the user to fly or dive over and within the c oastal environment of interest, - a multimedia database (text, graphs, image, maps, geographic objects, modelling results…) specific to the territory of interest, - an interactive interface which helps in finding relevant information associated to specific questions The technologies used include VRML data format, integration o f standard GIS format (shp, grid, img) within the navigator, integration and display of modelling data. The production chain is realised in C++ and Java Scripts allow dialogue between web pages and 3D windows. Applications are presented on the coasts of the Languedoc Roussillon region and the Thau lagoon area (French mediterranean border) in the framework of ICZM problematics.