Full Digital Workflow for Chart Production

For the first time BSH was able to issue a digital chart data set and the corresponding paper chart that have been produced simultaneously from the same data base without any analogue working steps in-between. The production system, called „Nautical Hydrographic Information System" (NAUTHIS), is based on a complex software environment, which has been developed within several years in a joint venture with the Canadian company CARIS. At the heart of this project were the specifications and the testing for development of the software "Hydrographic Production Database - HPD". Its introduction led to a radical rearrangement of the traditional workflow in BSH´s chart production. By means of this suite of tools, all hydrographic information gathered by BSH´s own survey vessels during their survey season, and even every kind of external digital source material delivered from the national waterways and land mapping administration can be collected, processed and prepared for the variety of different nautical publications production lines.

As one of the major benefits, HPD technology ends the laborious segregated processing and storing of source data for individual products. Instead, HPD offers a single consistent and up to date database as "the" source for all products. BSH can claim to be one of the first national hydrographic services worldwide, who is using this state of technology approach for production of both printed and digital nautical charts of the same area.

It should be noted that both currently published HPD based products cover a part of the German Wadden Sea, an area of outmost complexity from cartographic perspective. The successful completion of the paper and the digital product for this area marks an ideal starting point for the rapid extension of the HPD technology further to the remaining parts of BSH´s chart portfolio of the German territorial waters. Completing the NAUTHIS database is making rapid progress already and opens enhanced options to develop customised data sets beyond the classic ENC-Format. A definite goal in mid-terms is the application of the HPD software, and the extension of the corresponding NAUTHIS database to the production of text oriented nautical publications like Notices to Mariners and Sailing Directions. BSH is therefore actively contributing to the ongoing international standardisation efforts to define a data model for such nautical publications to incorporate their production into the NAUTHIS procedures as well. The proposed data model is constructed along the lines of the future S-100 Geospatial Standard for Hydrographic Data of IHO which promises the connection of the sphere of hydrography to the mainstream in GIS-development.