Basic theory and key technologies for marine geographic information system

Marine geographic information system (MGIS) has great ability to deal with the spatio-temporal problems and has potential superiority when it is applied to oceanography. Using the feature extraction of oceanic phenomena as a case study, the functions of the MGIS are analyzed, and thus the position of MGIS in the oceanography is defined. Comparing the requirement of MGIS with that of the traditional GIS which has been developed in the terrestrial applications in the past four decades, the frame for the functions of MGIS is constructed. According to the established MGIS, some key technologies are discussed in detail with emphasis on the specialities which can distinguish the MGIS from the traditional GIS.