The North and Baltic Sea Information System (NOKIS) has the goal to estab- lish an information infrastructure for the German coast, driven by metadata. The system is based on a metadata driven framework and provides a set of tools for handling and using coastal data. One of the tools to fi nd datasets is a gazetteer to search for information by toponyms. Beyond that, such a gazetteer-service
... [Show full abstract] should be made available as an independent service. As a technical base for implementing the NOKIS gazetteer, the gazetteer of the Alexandria Digital Library project, was selected. Additional characteristics were implemented for the special needs of a coastal gazetteer. The fast-chang- ing geomorphology necessitates that the representative geometrical extensions of toponyms are time-dependent. A multilingual concept supports dialects and the Frisian language. Toponyms and geometries were collected in the area of the Schleswig- Holstein Wadden Sea for testing the WEB-service. These are names of creaks, plates or sandbanks, actual names or historic toponyms. The compilation of geographic names and their spatial representation goes forward to provide a gazetteer service for the whole German coast until 2009.