ArcGIS for Maritime: Charting production environments (Maritime Charting)

ArcGIS for Maritime: Charting allows the creation of navigational products in two production environments, an enterprise or desktop production environment. The toolsets for both of these environments are the same; however, data management and workflows are different. Both environments are managed by the product library, which allows you to create, store, and publish nautical products.

The enterprise production environment

The enterprise implementation of Maritime Charting consists of the central Nautical Information System (NIS) database and production databases, which are linked.

The NIS database is the authoritative data where updates are applied. The updates may be short or long transactions. The NIS database is implemented as an RDBMS and leverages ArcGIS for Server functionality such as versioning and archiving. Existing legacy data from a variety of formats can be used to populate the NIS database. Once legacy data is in the NIS database, features are maintained there as product-neutral.

The production databases are traditional navigational products, such as chart or ENC, but in the geodatabase format. The production databases are extracted from the NIS database, based on the navigational products scale and footprint, or AOI. The production databases are updated with changes from the NIS database via Esri's replication technology through a synchronization step. Then the data is output to its respective product format, such as S-57, raster, or hard copy.

Enterprise production environment

The desktop production environment

The desktop production environment manages nautical data as many individual production geodatabases. The desktop implementation supports navigational products such as ENCs, AMLs, DNC, and paper charts. Edits are applied to the individual geodatabases.

Similar to the enterprise implementation, data is output to its respective product format, such as S-57, raster, or hard copy, from the individual production database.

Desktop production environment