Beginning in 2001 a consortium of Marine GIS experts from various universities, government agencies and private industry joined together with ESRI to develop a data structure that could serve as an industry standard for storing coastal, near shore and deep sea data in a geodatabase, and supporting applications within each domain. In 2002 Michael Blongewicz of DHI Water & Environment (DHI) joined the consortium and became the technical lead responsible for designing the database schema that is now being published under the title of Arc Marine: GIS for a Blue Planet (Wright, D.J., Blongewicz, M.J., Halpin, P.N. and Breman, J. in press, 2007. Arc Marine: GIS for a Blue Planet, Redlands, CA: ESRI Press, ~275 pp. ISBN 978-1-589-48-017-9)
The Arc Marine data model provides users of ArcGIS a means by which they can manage and leverage their GIS datasets in an industry standard format, providing for easier start up, greater efficiency during implementation and interoperability between applications. DHI’s interest in participating in this consortium focuses on their continuing goal of allowing users of DHI Software to better leverage their existing datasets. DHI has extended Arc Marine with additional feature classes and data tables in order to accommodate DHI’s modeling needs. This allows users building datasets within ArcGIS to more easily integrate their data with DHI Software.
DHI’s Michael Blongewicz, second author and technical lead, assisted with the implementation of Arc Marine for several of the case studies that make up the contents of the book. Dawn Wright, Oregon State University and project lead states, "DHI was a major asset to the outcome and success of this data model project. Indeed it could not have been completed without Michael’s experience and expertise in UML, and we also greatly anticipate the continued success of the related tool, MIKE Marine, throughout the coastal science and management communities." DHI’s contribution to this book illustrates DHI’s broad capabilities that includes the understanding of shoreline, near shore and deep see hydraulics and the implementation of models in these areas, as well as the collecting and management of model data that might span several dimensions and time. DHI’s MIKE Marine GIS software makes direct use of the extended Arc Marine data model and provides tools for users to import surveys, build transects, edit data values and view models results.