A major challenge of applying the recently adopted Integrated coastal Zone Management Protocol (ICZM) for the Mediterranean to help decision making, is the integration of different types of data together with the institutional fragmentations of responsibilities concerning coastal areas at regional, country and local levels.

A new brochure for policy makers has just been released as a PEGASO communication tool to increase to their knowledge about the ICZM with special focus on Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI). The SDI allows the application of new spatial technologies and spatial information to store data and their attributes, and their related documentation (metadata), offering a means to discover, visualize, and evaluate related coastal information, and finally provide access to the data themselves.

The brochure explains the three functions that guarantee and facilitates the access to data and information under the PEGASO project: the Catalogue, the Map Viewer and the Atlas.