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BarentsWatch launched

The information portal BarentsWatch was launched by Foreign Minister Jonas Gahr Støre in Tromsø on Wednesday.

The Norwegian surveillance and early warning system for the Barents Sea, BarentsWatch, was officially launched yesterday.

Location

BarentsWatch is much more than a web portal for information from the 27 different governmental and research institutions with responsibility for Norway’s management of coastal and sea areas that contribute to the project, Finnmarken writes. It is constructed in a way that enables the user to combine the information in any possible way. 

The first version of the open information portal was marked in Tromsø yesterday. At the opening Norway’s Foreign Minister Jonas Gahr Støre said that this is one of the core areas of the government’s policy on the High North:  “The coastal state of Norway is taking responsibility here. To get the Barents Sea “online” was one of the main suggestions from the first governmental commission on the High North in 2006”, the minister said. 

On its launch, the BarentsWatch portal contains information services based on data from six government agencies and editorial content from a number of additional agencies. The number of services will gradually increase. The operations centre for the portal is located in Tromsø. 

In parallel with the establishment of this open system, a closed, operational system will be developed to combine information from various sources in order to facilitate dealing with special situations.