Content area
Abstract
The three main parts of this thesis correspond with different objectives. The conducting line of all these is information used as a resource:
The 1st Part occupies the first four chapters, in which the two main aspects of the research have been intended to be conceptualised: coastal metropolitan areas and Geographic Information Systems (GIS). In the first of these, the areas have been defined with special emphasis on their singularities regarding other coastal and urban spaces. The second chapter points out present problems in the mentioned areas, emphasizing the need of an adequate management.
In chapters three and four Geographic Information Systems have been addressed. Whilst the third chapter defines and characterises the present state of these system the fourth chapter intends to demonstrate and justify the existence of SILM (Litoral and Marine Information System) as something specific and different from the rest of GISs, singularising its essential and defining elements.
The 2nd Part has a basic objective: analyse a few aspects of the Bay of Cadiz, accepting its condition of a coastal metropolitan area. This analysis of the Bay has been made in just four chapters, of which the first (fifth in the thesis) intends to delimit the area, enumerating the existing sources of information and give a past, present and future vision of the zone through cartographic images and comparative tables.
The other chapters are monographics concerning the other three concrete aspects of the coastal metropolitan system: population, transport and planning.
The 3rd Part outlines the final result of the study, named SIBCA (Information System of the Bay of Cadiz), a model to undertake new structures of information in zones of similar characteristics. This study will be incomplete if this model is only useful as a laboratory example as the intention is to allow it to jump to reality as a management tool.