Die Küste, 81 (2014), 29-43 
37 
Ministries responsible for the German coastal zone (STÄNDIGER AUSSCHUSS UMWELT 
INFORMATIONSSYSTEME 2008). 
The central components of the MDI-DE are hosted at BSH. These are the Web por 
tal, which integrates harmonized data and services from Federal and State resources, a 
metadata management system for harvesting and archiving, a coastal gazetteer, a thesau 
rus for marine vocabularies, and central data assessment services. All partners maintain 
their distributed infrastructure nodes (see section 2.2) within the MDI-DE network and 
contribute to necessary maintenance, update and development expenditures based on an 
allocation key. 
2.2 Technical infrastructure 
Data and metadata of die MDI-DE partners are maintained in local infrastructure nodes. 
This denotes the hardware and software of a local server architecture, with which spatial 
data and metadata are managed and deployed via standardized services. According to the 
Publish-Find-Bind-principle the individual components interact with each other by ser 
vices compliant with OpenGeospatial Consortium (OGC 2011) standards. Binder 
(2012) gives a comprehensive description of infrastructure nodes from which Fig.4 is 
taken as a prototype example. 
Figure 4: The elements of a prototype MDI-DE infrastructure node. 
Any information flow is directed towards die MDI-DE Web portal, which is die central 
node of die MDI-DE network. Being implemented by standardized OGC Web services 
for mapping WMS, download WFS and searching CS-W, the information hosted at