New Zealand’s New Hydrographic Geospatial Standard

17 December 2009

LINZ – New Zealand’s Hydrographic Office – will be adopting a new active hydrographic geospatial standard for marine data and information.

The new standard is being issued by the International Hydrographic Organisation (IHO) starting with IHO S-100 (now released) which is focused on data modelling and data transfer. It will be followed by S-101 which is focused on product specification and general rules for encoding.

The new standards are being developed to replace the current IHO transfer standard for digital hydrographic data – S-57, formally adopted in 1992. S-57 was intended to be a uniform standard for the exchange of data between different Hydrographic Offices and for the distribution of hydrographic data to manufacturers or mariners.

Use of S-57 is almost exclusively for encoding Electronic Navigational Charts (ENCs). That exclusivity has meant it has not been widely used by other geographic information system (GIS) domains. IHO S-100 has been developed to address this problem and create more versatility.

S-100 is based on the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) 19100 series of international geographic standards. The benefits of adopting S-100 include:

• using ISO-developed components and terminology that will help ensure S-100 and future extensions are in the mainstream of the geospatial information industry
• new components of S-100 will not be developed in isolation from the rest of the spatial information technology
• any new requirements can be incorporated within the established framework of ISO based standards
• S-100 will be interoperable with other ISO standards and profiles
• S-100 hydrographic data will be available to all, not only hydrographic offices and ECDIS equipment
• S-100 will facilitate the ability of Hydrographic Offices to use other sources of geospatial data.

The new standard will replace the current standard for the production of ENCs. The timing of LINZ’s adoption of S-100 will depend upon its implementation in the ENC production software which will occur when work on the new S-101 ENC product specification is complete.

Find out more about the new S-100 standard at the New Zealand Geospatial Strategy website.

Find out more about LINZ charts and hydrographic services.

Media enquiries: Rebecca Ward, Land Information New Zealand, phone +64 4 471 6330, mobile +64 27 278 3968, email media@linz.govt.nz.