LINZ Hydrographic Infrastructure Project
Land Information New Zealand (LINZ) is the New Zealand Government's steward of authoritative hydrographic information for nautical charts and publications and provides the hydrographic infrastructure to support these services and products. This includes the policy, administration, people, technology and spatial information. LINZ inherited the infrastructure from the Royal New Zealand Navy in 1996. Digital and analogue data are stored in numerous datasets. However, the information is primarily in hard copy and there is no consistent metadata across these datasets. This system is not responding to the demands of the organisation and its clients. LINZ has sought an approach to standardising and aligning the capture, maintenance and provision of hydrographic information.
The Hydrographic Data Infrastructure (HDI) project will give LINZ the ability to respond to the huge increases in the volume of data being produced by modern survey systems such as LIDAR and MBES, thus facilitating LINZ to meeting customer expectations for current and future hydrographic information and products. A new hydrographic database applications with S-57 compliant data will become the basis for current and future products and services. Data agreements and processes will be improved and the customers can obtain the data via electronic channels. In 2007, LINZ will bring new data management software on line and implement new processes. Both digital and analogue environments will initially operate side by side, until the digital environment has sufficient authoritative data to replace the old systems. It will take 2-3 years to have data compliance to S-57 standards, and facilitate full digital production and availability of hydrographic services and products. The New Zealand Government has a philosophy of 'capture once, use many times'. By making the metadata available, LINZ will reduce the duplication of effort and the costs of capturing data, and make the underlying data much more accessible to users than before.
