The Gulf of Maine is a complex natural system that is bounded by the coasts of the U.S. states of Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Maine, and the Canadian provinces of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. The preservation of the delicate balances of this complex ecosystem and the wise management of the environmental, economic and social interrelationships across the region are essential to the economy and quality of life for residents of its coastal communities.

This project aims to increase awareness of these complex relationships through improving the ability of a specific community of public scientists to better relate its findings to a broader public. The project will focus on the Marine Realms Information Bank (MRIB) with the objective of broadening its base of users and contributors. MRIB is a USGS project developed by geologists, oceanographers and geographers that provides access to scientific information about U.S. coastal and marine environments. The worldview of this specialist community as represented in MRIB will be examined by the project's interdisciplinary teams. They will evaluate the present means of searching MRIB via its online map displays and text-based queries. Resulting from this review, an improved MRIB will become the base for creating a digital library for the Gulf of Maine region.

The three distinct groups that will interact throughout the coming year will experiment with web-based collaborative and graphical tools for communicating diverse perspectives. In addition to increasing MRIB's capacity, participants will be exploring the possibility of creating an interdisciplinary course at the University of Maine on problems of knowledge management, classification and representation. For members of the coastal and island communities served by Island Institute fellows, this project brings an opportunity to improve their direct access to relevant environmental knowledge about the Gulf of Maine.

Hunting, Sam. 2002. Topic Maps / Pattern Languages: An Approach to Supporting Community-Based Inter-Island Conversations. Philadelphia, PA: eTopicality.

Schroeder, Paul C. 2003. A Resonance Model of Information and the Design of Question Spaces: A Report from New Directions Downeast.Colorado School of Mines Quarterly 103:1, 55-63.

Christopher Brehme (GIS/Remote Sensing)

Nathan Michaud (Community Planning)
Island Institute, Rockland, Maine

Michael Grillo (History of Art)

Michael Herman (Cartographic Design)

Jennifer Pixley (Technical Writing)

Paul Schroeder (Spatial Information Science)

Jefferson White (Philosophy/Ontology)
University of Maine, Orono, Maine

Thomas Aldrich (Marine Research Infrastructure)

Frances Lightsom (Physical Oceanography)

Fausto Marincioni (Information Systems/Geography)
USGS, Woods Hole, Mass.