Application of Metadata (GIS) in Integrated Coastal Zone Management

Due to the existence of rich resources and unique natural capabilities, coastal zones all over the world have drawn man’s attention in such a way that they have attracted more population. The pressure of population on coasts and overusing the resources have created many problems and brought about ecological crisis in the trend of sustainable development. Geographic information systems (GIS) in integrated coastal zone management (ICZM) can play an active role. The first role of GIS in coastal zone management is to organize information correctly. The application of GIS starts with establishing a stable structure for the data which have basic differences in the nature, scale, form and topic and continues with keeping, updating, publishing and developing information basis. In other words, the existence of ICZM is established with the presence of GIS, continues with its assistance, and its development depends on the progress of GIS. With the recent progresses of WebGIS, the possibility of sharing geographic data via designing and creating metadata has materialized and the integrated coastal zone management has found new dimensions. In this research Khoor Moosa has been chosen as a geographic event on the coast of the Persian Gulf and its data bank has been established in the GIS environment. Its metadata has then been designed with a standard model of FDGC and ISO and placed in the web environment. The results of this research confirm the necessity of establishing special standards for designing metadata on the coasts of country which are first compatible with the national geographic data bank and secondly based on the principles of specialized coastal management. In this research a model has been offered to standardize coastal geographic data to achieve integrated coastal zone management.