NOAA's National Ocean Service has recently launched an excellent web tool - known as the State of the Coast - allowing users to explore a variety of connections among coastal communities.

Susan Holmes, with the Special Projects Division at NOAA national Ocean Service, has provided the following description of the State of the Coast tool:

This week I'm in Juneau attending a Regional Data Integration Workshop hosted by the Alaska Coastal Rainforest Center and Southeast Alaska GIS Library at the University of Alaska Southeast.  The organizers are bringing together nearly 40 scientists and practitioners from federal and state agencies, universities, and non-profits to coordinate data and data integration tools built to address issues of regional importance.  A bit more on that below, but first here are the week's updates:

This week's post outlines advancements in Data Basin function, content, and community engagement.

1. Functional Enhancements

Here's is a look under the Data Basin hood this week:

1.  Functional Enhancements:

The software develpment team is working toward a deployent of updates later this week.  This will include better handling of emails / in-system messages and several other changes described in last week's update (Tiger by the Tail). 

Working on Data Basin has sometimes felt like "having a tiger by the tail.”  As of late, our beloved tiger has been purring, and we've made some advances!  With the goal of providing Data Basin users with more regular updates and stimulating feedback, I'll be creating posts to describe and seek input on:

To date, the Data Basin system has been powered in part by a custom, beta version of ESRI's ArcGIS Online.  Now that the officially-supported, public version of ArcGIS is available, Data Basin will migrate content over and start using this newer version.

During the development of Data Basin, we reached out to hundreds of scientists and practitioners to ask about their experiences, needs and wants.  One thing we heard over and over again, was 'how is this effort any different than other efforts that have failed?'.