The Management and Issuance of Electronic Navigational Chart in Marine Spatial Information Platform

Aiming at the urgent problem existed in today's constructions of shipping information system that the marine spatial data can not be sweepingly shared, this paper proposes a Marine Spatial Information Platform (MSIP) for marine spatial data accessing and sharing. The MSIP is running in the framework of Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE), is supported by business relation database system, and provides the data sharing service by web. Electronic Navigational Chart (ENC) is an official nautical chart. However, there is no easy way to access ENC because of its specialized data format and visualization method. We present the relation data model for ENC data which conforms to International Hydrographic Organization (IHO) S-57 format and store ENC data by business relation database system. The extensible Mark-Up Language (XML) is used to transport ENC data and visualization instruction between client and server. Here, the display of ENC which confirms to IHO S-52 specification is fulfilled in browser by running Java Applet. To validate the feasibility of proposed system, we implement a prototype system.