Introduction to Electronic Navigational Charts (ENC)

An Electronic Navigational Chart (ENC) is a vector chart that also conforms to the IHO specifications, as contained in Publication S-57, which is a transfer standard for vector data. The Nautical Solution has two production environments in which you can produce ENC products, the enterprise and the desktop workflows. These production procedures guide you through both production environments for creating an ENC.

About the production environments

The enterprise production environment

The Nautical Information System (NIS) is an enterprise environment that consists of centralized data. Using the NIS workflow, all data is stored and maintained in a Central Data Repository (CDR), and individual ENC products are maintained in isolated databases. Geodatabase replication is the mechanism that ensures that the data in these two databases is synchronized. The supporting information that is used to generate the individual product 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 than the CDR. Each product database is built on the ArcSDE geodatabase and managed through the product library. The NIS workflow is the suggested workflow when creating and managing a large number of products. Here are just a few of the advantages of using the NIS workflow:

• S-57 based, product neutral Central Data Repository.
• The NIS leverages ArcSDE technology.
• Takes full advantage of the Product Library data management capabilities.

The desktop production environments

The desktop workflows are client driven where the data for a given product is isolated, meaning it is not replicated to another database. When setting up the desktop workflow, the product library is used to load the schema via Implement Instance.

There are two desktop production environments that you can use, depending on your data compilation needs. If you need to create S-57 data from scratch, run the Populate process using the Nautical Desktop Populator method. This method can be set at the product class level within the product class properties. If you need to modify existing S-57 data, you can just implement your product instance and import the cell directly into the product geodatabase.

Both desktop workflows 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 NIS 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 Nautical Solution ENC production environment is performed in the ArcSDE versioning environment, whether using the enterprise (NIS) or desktop workflow. There are two approaches for working with data your products data.

1. You can create a product and create new data for it.
2. You can create a product and load existing data into it.

Steps for working with new or existing data

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

Steps for working with new or existing data