Introduction to Electronic Navigational Charts (ENC) (Maritime Charting)
An Electronic Navigational Chart (ENC) is a vector chart that conforms to the IHO specifications, as contained in Publication S-57, which is a transfer standard for vector data. ArcGIS for Maritime: Charting has two production environments in which you can produce ENC products: the enterprise and the desktop. These production procedures guide you through both production environments for creating an ENC.
About the production environments
The enterprise production environment
The enterprise production environment consists of centralized data, which means that all data is stored and maintained in the Nautical Information System (NIS) database, and individual ENC products are maintained in isolated databases called production databases. Geodatabase replication is the mechanism that ensures that the data in these two databases is and remains synchronized. The supporting information that is used to generate the individual production databases, such as geographic area of interest and scale band definition, is stored in another database called the product library, which may or may not be a physically different database from the NIS. Each production database is managed through the product library. The enterprise environment is the suggested workflow when creating and managing a large number of products. Here are just a few of the advantages of using the enterprise production environment:
- S-57 based, product-neutral Nautical Information System (NIS) database.
- The NIS leverages ArcSDE technology.
- Takes full advantage of the product library data management capabilities.
The desktop production environments
With the desktop production environment, the production databases are managed individually, and there is no link to an NIS. There are two approaches to creating products via the New Nautical Product wizard. You can either compile new data from resources such as scanned nautical charts, digital hydrographic data, and nautical publications or import an existing S-57 cell into your production database.
Both desktop workflow types are designed to have one product (that is, an ENC cell) per geodatabase. The desktop workflows are recommended when creating and managing a small number of products. Although the desktop workflows lack many advantages of the enterprise workflow, they do have some advantages, such as
- Your databases are managed through the product library.
- Scaled-down enterprise editing through Desktop/Workgroup connection.
- All edits are performed on the same database.
About producing an ENC
The Maritime Charting ENC production environment is performed in a versioning environment, whether using the enterprise or desktop workflow. There are two approaches for working with data.
- You can create a product and create new data for it.
- You can create a product and load existing data into it.
|
Step |
Creating new data |
Loading existing data |
|---|---|---|
|
1 |
Setting up the ENC production environment |
Setting up the ENC production environment |
|
2 |
Loading ENC source data |
Loading ENC source data |
|
3 |
Creating new ENC data |
Importing and baselining existing ENC data |
|
4 |
Editing ENC features |
Editing ENC features |
|
5 |
Creating and modifying ENC primitive features |
Creating and modifying ENC primitive features |
|
6 |
Verifying your ENC data |
Verifying your ENC data |
|
7 |
Exporting, publishing, and packaging your ENC product |
Exporting, publishing, and packaging your ENC product |