New Hydrographic Geospatial Standard to be Adopted by New Zealand

Author: Verena Borsos
Date: 10 December 2009

Tags: LINZ, data, charts, hydrography, IHO, ISO, standards

Land Information New Zealand (LINZ) - New Zealand's Hydrographic Office - will be adopting a new active hydrographic geospatial standard for marine data and information. The new standard, IHO S-100, will enable future development of advanced navigation products and services and will also provide the platform for using and integrating official hydrographic data with other geospatial data.

S-100 has been issued by the International Hydrographic Organization (IHO) and will replace the current standard for producing Electronic Navigational Charts (ENCs), IHO S-57. Where S-57 was only focused on ENCs, S-100 is a standard that promotes the usability of hydrographic data across the whole geospatial industry, which fits well with LINZ's strategic direction for geospatial delivery.

The primary goal for S-100 is to be able to support a greater variety of hydrographic related digital data sources, products and customers (eg raster data, 3D and time varying data) - as well as new applications like high-density bathymetry or marine GIS that go beyond the scope of traditional hydrography. Another improvement will be the encapsulation of ENC data where users or data producers can decide what data structure is used for the exchange of ENC data.

S-100 is based on the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) 19100 series of geographic standards that specify the methods, tools and services for:

• data management
• acquiring, processing, analyzing, accessing and presenting data
• transferring data in digital electronic form between different users, system and locations.

The advantage of developing a standard that is based on ISO 19100 is the compatibility with a range of other ISO geospatial standards. However, alignment with ISO 19100 will require a new structure and a new set of terms used to describe the components.

Adopting S-100 will have a number of benefits:

• using ISO-developed components and terminology will help ensure that S100 and future extensions are in the mainstream of the geospatial information industry
• new components of S-100 will not be developed in isolation from the rest of the spatial information technology
• any new requirements can be incorporated within the established framework of ISO based standards
• S-100 will be interoperable with other ISO standards and profiles
• S-100 hydrographic data will be available to all, not only hydrographic offices and ECDIS equipment
• S-100 will facilitate the ability of Hydrographic Offices to use other sources of geospatial data.

S-100 has now been adopted as an active standard by the IHO. In time all national Hydrographic Offices around the world will use the standard for the production of official products for safety of navigation and it will provide the necessary framework for a Marine Spatial Data Infrastructure (MSDI) for New Zealand.

The introduction of S-100 will not have any adverse impact on the production of New Zealand ENC's and ECDIS that rely on the S-57 standard. For the foreseeable future LINZ will continue the production of official ENCs using the S-57 standard.

The timing of LINZ's adoption of S-100 will depend upon the new standard being implemented in the ENC production software, which will occur when work on the new S-101 ENC product specification is complete.

Verena Borsos
Data Analyst (Hydrographic)
Land Information New Zealand

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