The Geographical Information System of the Brazilian Coastal Management Program

The paper discusses the coastal management program presents; and two modules which are intimately associated and integrated with the system of geoenvironment information: the Zoning and the Monitoring. The main goal of SIGECOS concerns the environmental analysis which supports coastal planning as well as its development, and studies related to the surveys, to the monitoring and, consequently, to the management of the Brazilian coasts. The modules begin with the geocodification of data until arriving at the level of information processing. The 'software' which integrates these modules is considered to be the 'thinking body' of the coastal management information system. It is composed of submodules that contain approximately 30 programs prepared initially in BASIC and compatible to microcomputers of Apple and PC/XT types. For a better integration with the users of several Brazilian states, this software has been decodified in the following languages: Pascal, Fortran 70 and 87, and C. The data bank of the SIGECOS presents as INPUT option, data of descriptive nature such as: system description, data about the Coastal Management Law, variable contents, data of socio-economic nature such as the ones taken out from the IBGE census, and data originated from the thematic mapping in different processing scales (nominal, ordinal, interval and ratio). Additional aspects of the subject are discussed.