Lost with electronic charts

摘要

Some 12 months ago I wrote an article for this very magazine, entitled 'Mercator and his projection or are we aiming for the moon'. In the final sentence I posed the question as to why it had taken NASA only 10 years to reach the moon, but nobody in our industry wanted to answer the question as to why a fairly straightforward technology has been discussed and worked on for more than 20 years, and there was still a dearth of official electronic chart data in a vector format (ie, ENCs, or electronic navigational charts). Little seems to have changed since then. What do the ship owner, manager navigator actually want? In their own words: 'We want to be able to dispense with paper charts and only use electronic databases'. A number of chart users to whom the writer has spoken still fail to understand how the IHO and IMO have managed to manoeuvre the industry into the situation that we are in. Did not the International Hydrographic Organisation and its members know how much data had to be created when this saga started?