This book has arisen out of a decade-long collaborative initiative between the Commission on Marine Cartography of the International Cartographic Association and the Commission on Coastal Systems of the International Geographical Union, and manifested in the series of conferences known as the CoastGIS Symposia. The first CoastGIS meeting was held in Cork, Ireland, in February 1995. Since then, successive events have taken place in Aberdeen, Scotland (1997), Brest, France (1999) and Halifax, Nova Scotia (2001). The majority of chapters presented in the pages that follow had their origins in papers presented at the Halifax meeting, supplemented by a selection of additional contributions commissioned by the editors specifically for this.
