Marine Planning and Service Platform (MAPS): An Advanced Research Engine for Grey Literature in Marine Science

The MAPS {Marine Planning and Service Platform} project is a development of the Marine project {Ricerca Industriale e Sviluppo Sperimentale Regione Liguria 2007-2013} aiming at building a computer platform for supporting a Marine Information and Knowledge System, as part of the data management activities. One of the main objective of the project is to develop a repository that should gather, classify and structure marine scientific literature and data thus guaranteeing their accessibility to researchers and institutions by means of standard protocols. We will present the scenario of the Operative Oceanography together with the technologies used to develop an advanced search engine which aims at providing rapid and efficient access to a Digital Library of oceanographic data. The case-study is also highlighting how the retrieval of grey literature from this specific marine community could be reproduced for similar communities as well, thus revealing the great impact that the processing, re-use as well as application of grey data have on societal needs/problems and their answers.