Ships and Maritime Installations around the world make use of Electronic Navigational Charts. Their use ensures the safety of ships and harbors.

Electronic Navigational Charts (ENCs) are accurate, secure and can be interpreted correctly by type-approved Electronic Chart Display and Information Systems (ECDIS).

However, the maritime chart standards that implement this can initially be confusing. The International Hydrographic Organization (IHO) has created a series of interlocking standards for encoding, securing, and displaying maritime navigational data. The most widely used are known as S-57, S-63, and S-52 respectively.

What Do These Standards Represent?

S-57 is the data format used to store and transfer digital hydrographic data between national hydrographic offices, and to distribute it to mariners and the people who consume the data. S-63 is a standard for encrypting and securing S-57 hydrographic data, and S-52 is a standard used by ECDIS manufacturers to specify how ENC data is styled and displayed.

Implementing IHO Standards in Your Application

Maritime navigation and surveillance charts are contained in “cells” which hold the data for a specific region and scale. Kongsberg Geospatial’s TerraLens SDK can efficiently load and display hundreds of these cell files and is widely used to build applications that require accurate maritime charts.

While TerraLens can be used to build navigational applications, it is more widely used for maritime surveillance applications. Like navigation applications, maritime surveillance applications require the accurate display of Electronic Navigational Charts (ENCs), but in addition to this they also require the display of real-time data from radar and other sensors.

TerraLens has full support for the S-52 styling including Day/Dusk/Night colors, regular or simplified symbols, and all navigation levels including the high-resolution river maps.

The display of the ENC can be customized to meet the end user’s needs: from scaling the size of symbology, to customizing the color schemes, to changing the display of depth values from meters to other units including yards or feet. Features can be displayed selectively to reduce clutter, or displayed fully to give the operator a full picture of the surrounding waters.

TerraLens is not limited to displaying just ENC data. It can combine ENC with any other map data including S-102 bathymetry data, while also providing tools to display real-time sensor tracks.

TerraLens is an operating system / IDE-agnostic geospatial Software Development Kit that has been optimized for high performance real-time applications.

If you are developing an application requiring a real-time mapping or geospatial component, you can learn more about TerraLens at the link below.