New IHO Guidelines for Hydrographic Geospatial Data
The IHO has published new guidelines for the development of product specifications for the creation of hydrographic geospatial data. Modern navigation systems and geospatial solutions use digital data from a variety of sources. In order to facilitate the integration of hydrographic data and applications, the IHO developed S-100, a hydrographic geospatial data standard that can support this array and that is fully aligned with international geospatial standards, in particular the ISO 19000 series.
The aim of the new S-97 guidelines is to assist in the creation of harmonized product specifications utilizing S-100 for implementation within the e-Navigation ecosystem. This encompasses all product specifications created for use in IMO-defined e-Navigation systems, both on shore and at sea, such as ECDIS. However, S-100 also has a wide range of applications that can extend beyond e-Navigation.
Standardized Product Specifications
S-100 is inherently more flexible than S-57 and makes provision for such things as the use of imagery and gridded data types, enhanced metadata and multiple encoding formats. It also provides a more flexible and dynamic maintenance regime for features, attributes and portrayal via a dedicated online registry. S-100 provides a framework of components that enables the building of standardized product specifications for the modelling of hydrographic data, thus providing true interoperability between different data standards and systems.
S-97 is intended for developers and maintainers of product specifications that utilize the IHO framework standard S-100 (Universal Hydrographic Data Model).
