Abstract
The Syscolag's program (LAGoonal and COastal SYStems) in LanguedocRoussillon area (LR) aims to contribute to the integrated management of coastal area (IMCA) by promoting pluridisciplinary research : its outputs should improve the decision making process. The Computer Sciences project presented in this paper focuses on the integrated aspect of information management by setting up a service to share and exchange information. The control of the semantic used in the field of IMCA is a key issue. The research teams involved in this project choosed to tackle in priority the geographic dimension of information since it covers broad thematic fields and it brings a solution for interdisciplinary vocabularies problems. The central component of the system is a metadata service which combinés a description of the resources using the ISO 19115 standard adapted to the field of IMCA in LR as well as additional semantic control for the thematic and geographic dimensions. Therefore, final users have at their disposal a thematic and geographic ontology to retrieve relevant information in a more efcient and natural way.