Area

The Area table provides geographic names given for a specific area of investigations. The table has two fields, one for the area name and one for a link to a descriptive page, mostly linked to Wikipedia. Area names attribute to the Campaign and Event tables. The content of the area field in event appears in the metaheader in the Event(s) line as Location: ....

Links

 * International Hydrographic Organization
 * IHO (1953) Limits of oceans and seas (pdf, 1 MB)
 * IHO (1998) Standards for hydrographic surveys (pdf, 2 MB)
 * EarthExplorer - search for the position of localities, cities, villages or geographic features provided by the USGS
 * NAVIONICS - for navigation, suitable for costal areas
 * Marine Gazetteer geographic name search with maps showing the region

Vision: Names of areas and localities are not standardized yet and thus should be used for data retrievals with care. Some standardization was planned by using the Limits of oceans and seas as defined by the IHO and border lines of countries, continents and islands. For continents above sea level, the names of the countries would be included. While importing new events, an algorithms could automatically set the relations to the specific entry in the area table. In turn this would allow retrievals of data in specific areas, e.g. by using a clickable map or a retrieval like which data are available in the Gulf of Mexico.