Introduction to the charting production environment (Maritime Charting)

The International Hydrographic Organization (IHO) provides standards for paper charting. These standards are provided as guidelines, understanding that each chart-producing agency may employ its own unique charting standards. The ArcGIS for Maritime: Charting provides you with the ability to customize the tools and workflows to meet your specific requirements.

Learn more about cartographic navigational products

System databases

Maritime Charting relies on configured system tables to ensure product integrity. These system tables are distributed between two types of databases: product library and the production databases. The product library database holds system-wide settings that will be used for all products. The Nautical New Product Wizard is used to create the production databases, which are stored in the product library. Over time, there will be many production databases, and these databases hold information that is unique to an individual chart product.

Production environments

With the Maritime Charting, there are two supported production environments for the creation of nautical chart products— enterprise and desktop.

Enterprise

An enterprise production environment allows many editors to change and update data using a relational database management system (RDBMS) via ArcSDE. Geometry and attribute edits occur in the Nautical Information System (NIS) database. These edits are then migrated to the production databases through replication.

Desktop

A desktop production environment will involve, in most cases, the use of an ArcSDE geodatabase for SQL Server Express licensed for ArcGIS for Desktop. Data management usually occurs in a single database that contains features based on a limited extent, which is usually the extent of the product being created. Only a limited number of people can work on the product at one time.

The charting process

With the Maritime Charting, a database is created per chart panel. Depending on your production environment, enterprise or desktop, the data is either replicated from the NIS or imported from an ENC.

Once the databases contain data, the production steps can then be performed on each panel database. The production steps involve symbolizing the data, creating grids, and cartographic finishing. When the production steps have been completed on each of the production databases, the page layout process can begin. These steps involve creating, adding, and positioning surround elements. Once these steps have been completed, the map document can then be used to produce various raster or vector outputs for publication and distribution.