FW: Tools for marine spatial planning (Tool FAQ #2)

This message was posted by: Julia Ekstrom
Dear EBM Tools List,
The following is a brief description of a tool that could be useful for marine spatial planning processes.
MINOE is one tool that can be used to help identify and investigate existing relevant governance, one of the first processes of marine spatial planning. The tool uses a conceptually modeled ecosystem, defined by the user, and text analysis of laws and regulations to determine which ecosystem linkages are potentially acknowledged in the documents. Features include an interactive table containing results about the laws and regulations within the user’s scope and scale of interest. In addition, MINOE includes metrics and visualization tools to synthesize management data, including estimates of what agencies are involved in managing various components and linkages in the
ecosystem.
The MINOE tool is part database, part search engine and part graphing software. The application works by collecting keywords and terms from the user to query a collection of laws and regulations (or other management documents) with a powerful search engine. The results are formatted into a table and presented to the user for further analysis. A collection of laws and regulations representing California, Oregon, Washington and federal U.S. is provided with the software so users can study how the documents relate to their analysis. Users may also import additional text documents for analysis of other regions or scales of management.MINOE is a free open source desktop application available for download at http://minoe.stanford.edu. I you would like a CD, please contact Julie Ekstrom at .
Please see http://minoe.stanford.edu for more information.