Specifying requirements for Automatic Generalisation of Electronic Navigational Charts

This short summary helps to grasp the motive behind the research, its objectives and to find out what is presented on the following pages of the report. It offers a condensed, one page recapitulation of its contents and intentions and suggests who might be interested to read it. CONTEXT Map generalisation is a tedious task, requiring skilled cartographers to work for long periods of time. Experience shows that compiling a map can take several months. It is the common wisdom that such labour?intensive tasks should be consigned to computers and thus be accomplished more uniformly, more precisely, more rapidly, and at much reduced cost (Buttenfield & McMaster, 1991). The benefits of automatic generalisation could aid hydrographic offices (HOs) in their ENC creation. OBJECTIVES The aim of the project is to create ‘hard knowledge’ specifications that could be subsequently used to create/use with tools for automatic generalisation of ENCs. The research compiles requirements of various HOs with the recommendations of S?4 and knowledge in model and cartographic generalisation of topographic charts to create computer translatable rules that allow creating a smaller scale/usage ENCs from a higher scale/usage ENC / S?57 data without or with minimum human interference. DELIVERABLES AND THEIR IMPACT The final report present a set of specifications, rules and tools that allow going from one compilation scale (Approach) to another (Coastal) without or with minimum human interference. It also discusses shortcomings and rate of success of such approach. The study mainly bases on the existing generalisation operators available in the literature, but where it is just? points out scarceness of the choice and proposes new solutions. As a result, an IHO standard could be created for the generalisation of charts (ENCs) and tools implemented in the software used for chart creation. WHO SHOULD READ THIS REPORT? This report might be found interesting by the GIS community, especially when interested in advancements in digital cartography and ENCs. The main recipients, however, are the hydrographic community, mainly Hydrographic Offices, and hydrographic software vendors. They may find ideas for potential implementations that could aid their business. The secondary recipients could be other parties linked to Electronic Navigational Charts, namely ECDIS producers and chart users. The author hopes that this research could also inspire other projects on automatic chart generalisation and complement projects on bathymetric generalisation.

Subject

Nautical Charts
ENC
Electronic Navigational Charts
Automatic Generalisation
Generalisation Operators
Multiscale databases
Cartography
Hydrographic Offices
Chart Requirements
S?57
Safety of Navigation

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