In lifewatch/mregions2: Access Data from Marineregions.org: Gazetteer & Data Products

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Since 2021, the geometries of the Marine Regions gazetteer are available as Well-Known Text (Loneville et al., (2021)), coming directly from the data base and offered as Open Linked Data and Linked Data Event Streams. Previously, they were just WMS links, in many cases coming from the Marine Regions OGC Web Services hosted at the Flanders Marine Institute (VLIZ) geoserver. Therefore, the functions of mregions did not use the ?MRGID in an effort to unify the geometries that were in geoserver with the gazetteer entries. However all those geometries hosted by third parties were left out.

This method is not needed anymore since we harvest the geometries from the WMS links and stored in the Gazetteer. mregions2 makes a very clear distinction between the Gazetteer database and the Data Products created by Marine Regions.

We decided to create a new package to not break compatibility. We will continue to maintain mregions::mregions but we won't add new developments.

What's new in mregions2?

During 2021, new web services were developed to access the Marine Regions Gazetteer. In essence, two major changes happened:

• The database can be accessed now through Open Linked Data standards: JSON-LD and Turtle.
• The geometry associated to each gazetteer record is now available through RESTful services.

More information in:

Lonneville B. et al. (2021) Publishing the Marine Regions Gazetteer as a Linked Data Event Stream. S4BioDiv 2021. http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2969/paper8-s4biodiv.pdf

The package uses these two new functionalities to serve geometries in R as sf::sf objects, and allows to retrieve the Gazetteer database as rdflib::rdf objects. See the Marine Regions Gazetteer as RDF article for further information.

lifewatch/mregions2 documentation built on April 17, 2025, 10:40 a.m.