The key for UNEP-MAP knowledge heritage: KMaP prototype

The presentation was held during the "Smart Marine Conservation Forum" - International Forum on Database Management and Digital Transformation for Marine Conservation, the 6th of March 2024 in Al Hoceima (Morocco).

Abstract:

UNEP-MAP and the Barcelona Convention System collect a consistent amount of data across Mediterranean Sea on multiple topics for inventory, mapping, monitoring assessment, conservation, and reporting purposes: from marine biodiversity to pollution; from sustainability and blue economy to marine spatial planning. At the same time UNEP-MAP produces documents for different purposes: strategic plans, reports, guidelines, etc.

Barcelona Convention was signed in 1975 and, as often occurs, governance principles and practices evolve in time due also to both technological advancements and an increased data management attention. To this purpose UNEP-MAP data policy was approved during the Conference of the Parties held in Antalya (Türkiye) in 2021, and, since then, some actions have been pursued to put in practice data policy provisions.

The UNEP-MAP Knowledge Management Platform (KMaP) is one of these actions and it represents an ambitious project aimed to manage the entire UNEP-MAP knowledge heritage, by following data policy principles. It is mainly composed of geographical data and documents, but it also includes presentations, videos, webinars, and other dissemination material. KMaP is actually structured in two main hubs: Data and Knowledge hub, managing geographical data and documents respectively. The data is retrieved from the UNEP-MAP components thanks to the interoperability standards. A third hub is foreseen for the next biennium, the Knowledge Exchange Hub, which is supposed to become the place where dissemination activities should take place. A wide user-requirements study has been carried out before platform implementation and the KMaP prototype enables different access levels, according to the type of user (if internal or external to UNEP-MAP, if registered or anonymous). Regarding technologies used, it is based on open-source software tools such as GeoServer and GeoNode , with a PostgreSQL and PostGIS extension for the management of both documents and geographical data. The system runs through Docker on a physical server and a Django admin interface allows INFO/RAC to manage the whole system.