This chapter summarizes key projects and initiatives that are being implemented on very large scales (national/international) by national governments and commissions to build coastal spatial data infrastructures (SDIs). These include SDI efforts in the US and Europe that are closely related to ICAN, and as such are of great value to its mission of developing interoperable atlases, providing along the way solutions for the integration of not only technologies, but people, institutions, and institutional objectives.

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This chapter provides a brief overview of various coastal web atlas projects around the world, providing a contextual bridge to the atlas case studies of Chapters 6-14. A summary of the policy context within which many European atlases operate is followed by a summary of other efforts emerging in Australia, the Western Pacific, Africa, and the Caribbean (as facilitated mainly by the Ocean Data and Information Network of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization’s International Oceanographic Data and Information Exchange). Atlas projects in the U.S. are summarized mainly via the results of a recent national survey of coastal managers reporting on the deployment and content of their atlases, with concluding thoughts on where there might be opportunities to develop approaches for a federated coastal atlas of the U.S.

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