Electronic chart systems are now ca.25 years finding their way to help the navigator in his work by showing him constantly where he is in respect to his surroundings. These systems and their associated aspects on data handling are also of interest to the hydrographic community.

The majority of the hydrographic community is (or should be) interested in Electronic Chart Systems, be it an ECDIS or ECS, and their aspects. To mention groups: from the public sector (mainly HOs) those that are involved in promulgation of regulations and in (ENC) data production, the private chart manufacturers, the ECDIS/ECS manufacturers, the seagoing surveyors for safely navigating their ships and the (private sector) surveyors who can use the systems as a base for their surveying
activities and to display their data results.

There is also a strong tie with the seagoing surveyor as it can be said that ECDIS/ECS evolved from the hydrographic data logging systems, which plotted the ships position on position plotting sheets. The evolvement into a general installed
equipment on ships was limited by the technical and price restraints from the computer technology at the beginning.
If used for surveying only, the IMO/IEC/IHOregulations are not so relevant for the systems. The surveyors however can exploit in their ECS or special survey systems the advantages of the S57-standard: an accepted and prescribed dataformat which can be of interest to the private sector surveying field. E.g. to transfer data to other applications. One application is the use of data to be displayed on top of navigational data e.g. Environmental Data.

It will be interesting to see in which way the ECDIS-ECS+ systems evolve the coming years. The price of the hardware cannot be a threshold anymore to enjoy the benefits from navigating with electronic chart systems, neither is the rapidly increasing coverage of official ENC's. It is the price tag on the official ENC's, which still make quite a lot of ship owners choosing for the combination of traditional paper chart navigation supported by an ECS+ with a world wide chart (commercial) database instead of going completely digital with an ECDIS-system.

We like to thank those manufacturers who contributed to the product survey by answering the questionnaire.