Digital Nautical Charts

Continuous Maintenance and Updates for Digital Nautical Charts

SAIC has developed a digital capability for both continuous maintenance and vector product format (VPF) updates to provide current nautical data updates to a digital nautical charts database.

This technology is extensible to any vector GIS database. It offers an all-inclusive production capability, including collecting, updating, and cleaning the database, and can disseminate vector-based patches as necessary to remote sites and users such as mariners.

File Patching Technology Speeds Updates

A digital nautical chart is a product that contains a collection of vector-based digital data designed to support marine navigation and other GIS applications by portraying selected maritime features in a format for computerized marine navigation.

Digital nautical chart regions are critical for navigation safety. Updates to these charts involves new collection of data on charts, researching updates to marine safety information and navigational aids along inland waterways and coasts, and cleaning and validation of digital nautical chart databases. The required change data can be voluminous. Sending full digital nautical chart replacements can require several hours to transmit, especially to low bandwidth receivers, making it operationally prohibitive.

To solve this problem, SAIC developed a digital nautical chart update capability based on a file patching technology. This technology is widely used in industry to update applications over the Web, essentially creating a new version of the software from an older version.

This technique greatly reduces the volume of data required to transmit the changes. By applying this technology to GIS databases, SAIC can reduce update data volumes by up to a factor of 100.

Automation Creates Greater Accuracy and Quicker Turnaround

The training required for the end-user is minimal, and the generation and application of the updates can be fully automated. The software is designed to help ensure that the updated data is error-free. This increases navigation safety for mariners, through elimination of past errors of omission or commission in the manual update of paper charts.