Event-Centric Information Management for Marine District Governance

Multi-use marine districts manage several processes: directing vessel traffic, responding to marine emergencies, tracking invasive species, among others. Each process responds to a series of events; and every process is supported by information systems that manage and maintain repositories of district-relevant information. Taken across all processes and their supporting systems, repository content holds significant potential to inform marine district governance and improve the quality of governance decisions. This article formulates an event-centric conceptual framework bringing together district-relevant events, event detection mechanisms, event response processes, and event-referent information repositories to support marine district governance. The framework provides a basis for assessing the applicability of information from different operational processes and the information acquisition and retention technologies they incorporate. The role of an information integrator to solicit and consolidate information across multiple processes is identified as a critical service to marine district governance. The paper concludes by describing areas of further work to validate, enrich, and extend the event-centric framework.