GeoGarage blog: A new layer in the GeoGarage platform : Croatia nautical charts based on rasterized ENC material from HHI

Monday, June 17, 2019

A new layer in the GeoGarage platform : Croatia nautical charts based on rasterized ENC material from HHI

Nautical charts for Croatia until today which leads to the availability of a new dedicated layer for Croatia with HHI ENCs :

Croatian raster charts in the GeoGarage platform included with the British Isles & misc. (UKHO) layer

note : with the arrival today of a dedicated and exhaustive layer for Croatia, these Admiralty raster charts for Croatia will be withdrawn in the next Q3-2019 release of the layer based on UKHO raster material

Until today, the GeoGarage platform used the raster chart material (RNC) provided by UKHO to display nautical charts for the Croatian areas.

Unfortunately, UKHO only integrates about a couple of charts (14 maps exactly) from the original digital nautical maps from HHI (Hrvatski hidrografski Institut) whole catalogue of paper maps (126 in total).

(see last UKHO update in the GeoGarage platform)

For internal management reasons specific to HHI, the Hydrographic Institute of Croatia can't deliver to their commercial licensees (whose GeoGarage) their own digital raster material (RNC) -with a recurrent periodicity for updates- corresponding to the Croatian nautical paper maps.

The GeoGarage platform was already in the capacity to deliver a rasterized visualization of Electronic Navigation Chart (vector ENC) through their web services (WMS/WMTS) for their customers involved in webmapping and other onshore GIS activities.

Today, the GeoGarage platform is ready to propose the visualization of ENC to their customers using mobile navigation apps (non SOLAS)

new ENC_HR layer :
Croatia (HHI) ENC coverage in the GeoGarage platform (150 cells)

view of Šibenik harbor (rasterized ENC overlaid on Google Maps imagery)

So Weather4D R&N users (with updated version 12/06/2019) can right now display the whole catalogue of HHI ENC (150 ENC at this time), with a quarterly updating process : see GeoGarage news

Today, in this first version, the vector ENC are displayed using a graphical rendering similar to the one used in official ECDIS (s-52 IHO specifications) : they are not to be used for shipping navigation (IMO SOLAS), but only for recreative use, not as a primary tool for navigation.

Effectively, in contrast to the use in ECDIS, there is no possibility -today with the W4D current version- to ask for text info and details regarding any navigational objects (beacon, buoy, marks...).