The NETMAR project has developed a pilot European Marine Information System (EUMIS) for searching, downloading and integrating satellite, in situ and model data from ocean and coastal areas. It is a user-configurable system offering flexible service discovery, access and chaining facilities using OGC, OPeNDAP and W3C standards. It uses a semantic framework coupled with ontologies for identifying and accessing distributed data, such as near-real time, forecast and historical data.