Database Design And Library Development Of Electronic Chart Based On S-57Standard

Electronic Chart Display and Information System (ECDIS) is one of the most important ship navigation electronic systems. It has incomparable advantages of the traditional paper chart. It has been widely applied and is becoming prevalence. System Electronic Chart (SENC) is the direct source of data for ECDIS. Electronic Chart database of user format is the base of SENC. Relevant international organizations developed series of standards, which requirements ECDIS must use electronic chart data compliant S-57standard. Processing S-57data set files is the basic aspect of electronic chart application.This article deeply analyzed International Hydrographic Organization(IHO)"s S-52standard and S-57standard, which is of primary standards for electronic chart; designed spatial database of electronic chart; developed a library for basic processing of S-57data set files.In the design of electronic chart database, the scheme of database management system is PostgreSQL and PostGIS. Create data tables for every object contained in S-57product specification. Each table has a geometry type field, which is used to save space geometry information of the object. PostgreSQL’s official C++ front-end libpqxx is adopted as database access interface. To achieve efficient management of electronic chart data by the powerful spatial processing capabilities of PostGIS.The library for S-57data set file basic processing is programed with C++. Its functions are loading files, update process and object information extraction. This library can completely preserve the data of S-57files, and can keep the logical structure of original data a certain extent. It can extract objects-full geometry information and attribute/catalogue information. It has certain universality for it is independent of any user data structure or format.