Generating a QC cell from the NIS (Maritime Charting)

After you have compiled your new NIS data or have made the necessary modification to your existing NIS, you can generate a quality control (QC) S-57 cell. Cells created using the Generate QC Cell tool can be opened and tested in third-party software to assist with verifying your data. The NIS is product neutral, so the extent and the compilation scale need to be defined to create the QC cell.

Note:

Any cell produced using the Generate QC Cell tool is for quality control purposes only and cannot be used for navigation. Navigational products must be created using the Export Nautical Product wizard.

Setting up the environment

If you use versioning, you can choose which version to use for generating the QC cell.

Steps:

1. Start ArcMap.
2. On the main menu, click Customize > Toolbars > Nautical.
3. Add the Nautical feature dataset from your NIS to the Table Of Contents window.
4. If necessary, change to an edit version by doing the following:
   1. Click the List By Source button at the top of the Table Of Contents window.
   2. Right-click the version workspace and click Change Version.

      The Change Version dialog box appears.

   3. Choose the edit version.
   4. Click OK.

Generating the QC cell

The Generate QC Cell tool contains two methods: Selected Polygon Feature and Graphic. Because most edits will be focused on a specific area, it is recommended that you use the Graphic option to draw a box around only the area that was edited. If you need to QC an entire cell, you can use the Selected Polygon Feature option with the product footprint, or area of interest (AOI).

Steps:

1. Choose the method you want to use.

   To create a QC cell from a polygon	Click the Select Features button on the Tools toolbar, select the polygon you want to use, click the Generate QC Cell drop-down menu on the Nautical toolbar, and click Generate QC Cell (Selected Polygon Feature).
   To create a QC cell by defining an extent	Click the Generate QC Cell drop-down menu on the Nautical toolbar, click Generate QC Cell (Graphic), and define the extent of your cell by clicking and dragging.

   The Generate QC Cell dialog box appears.

2. Type the scale to extract from the NIS in the Extract Scale text box.
3. Type a name for the cell in the Cell Name text box.

   The cell name should start with your agency code as defined in the Production Properties dialog box. For example, if your agency code is US, the first two letters of the cell name should be US. This naming convention will reduce errors reported in third party validation software.

4. For the Output Folder parameter, browse to the file location where you want to save the QC cell.
5. Click OK.

The cell is created in the output location.

The cell can now be validated by third-party validation software that supports S-58 checks. Once the log file is generated from the third-party validation software, the results can be loaded into the Reviewer table for corrections using the S-58 Log to Reviewer Table tool.