The Ministry maintains a geographic information system (GIS) of marine features and species, known as the National Aquatic Biodiversity Information System (NABIS) and sought to add new data on coastal features such as coastal outfalls, structures, Marae locations, etc.

The need for national datasets to combine all coastal information is evidenced by 58 of the 73 City and District Councils and all 12 Regional Councils in New Zealand having a coastline within their boundary. Each held individual datasets separately.

OMNILINK surveyed each TLA, gathering contact details and then the various GIS datasets (in multiple formats). The project included collection, conversion, collation, and testing of new datasets, together with their metadata. Data subsets for 12 pre-defined categories, to group and identify the installations in and usage of each area, were also included. Thereafter we produced GIS layers covering the key coastal features along the New Zealand coastline.