The new sustainable development data repository requires new analysis grids, in particular for factors accounted for in productive system typologies. This paper, based on the aquaculture example, analyses the diversity in aquaculture systems with respect to sustainable development. Various typologies are obtained by evaluating structural and functional approaches integrating variables related to production and regulation systems and to the territorial insertion of fish farms. Categories have been defined on a scale based on a set of five sites, which are representative of a wider range of aquaculture systems. Use of these categories goes beyond the local typologies and prepares a generic meta-typology classification for the systems. This generic classification is then compared to the views of sustainable development held by the fish farmers working on the various types of farms.