MAIN HEAD Paperless navigation - is there any progress? DECK HEAD Although progress is being made in making it easier for vessels to use electronic charts, it isn't moving fast enough for some shipowners BODY International coverage of official electronic charts (ENCs) is moving quite quickly now, with coverage available for most of North West Europe including Scandinavia (but not Italy), the US and Australia, with development efforts happening across North and South America and Asia. Primar Stavanager, which co-ordinates supply of ENCs from certain European hydrographic offices, reports 350 per cent growth in ENC sales over the last 12 months. There are still plenty of problems though, notably the difficulty in providing chart data onboard ships so that it is easy to use, update, and prove it is updated, but also in compliance with the requirements hydrographic offices set to ensure they get paid by the shipowner and the data is not interfered with on its way to the ship. The other problem is that for areas of the world where official ENC data is still not available, there is no international consensus on what shipowners should do then, if they need to go to paper charts or use a raster chart system or private vector database. It is convenient to use raster charts but shipowners can't risk having detentions, and there is still no international consensus on whether it is legal to depend on them for navigation. Shipowners want a chart system which is as easy and cost effective as possible to administrate, but the chart industry and regulators are forcing them to at best use a mixture of paper and electronic charts, if they want to use electronic charts at all. Stories are reaching Digital Ship of shipowners which have specified electronic chart systems on their new ships for about seven years but are no longer doing so due to lack of availability of official electronic charts ("ENCS"). Stories are also reaching Digital Ship of shipowners so frustrated with how hard it is to get their shipboard electronic chart systems working that they are threatening to throw them over the side. Stories are reaching Digital Ship of shipowners demanding answers from the regulatory authorities about why they are not allowed to use private vector charts produced by C-MAP for navigation, even though C-MAP produces the charts for hydrographic offices which they are allowed to use for navigation using exactly the same methods and quality tools. It is interesting to note that the most powerful arbiter of safety standards in the oil tanker industry is not flag or port state control but the Oil Companies International Marine Forum (OCIMF). It is generally much more demanding than port state control or flag because the oil companies have so much more to lose in any tanker accident. OCIMF has just published a guide of what it considers to be "best practise" in tanker operations - and it will ask shipowners how many of the criteria in the guide they think they meet when considering giving them a charter. Under the "navigation" section of the guide, it simply says that ships should have an electronic chart system, but it is not too concerned about whether the system is official ENC, private vector data or raster. SUBHEAD Making systems easy to use A major stumbling block with shipboard use of ENCs is how hard it is to get the systems to work onboard the ship, update it and prove you updated it, a problem largely caused by the encryption system. The United States takes the view that chart data is produced as a national property financed by tax money, and supplies the data unencrypted, free of charge from a website - it does not even allow the data to be encrypted by anybody - this makes the data easy to use onboard ship. The Primar Stavanger group of hydrographic offices (mainly France and Scandinavia) take the opposite view, that it is their responsibility to ensure that they get paid royalties every time their data is used, the data is not interfered with on the way to the ship, and in some cases chart distributors cannot be trusted to do any of these things. France in particular takes a very tough line, saying that its chart data can only be released encrypted via Primar and cannot be unencrypted until it reaches the ship, with systems to ensure that only chart systems with registered ID numbers can read it and distributors can't touch it. This makes for tricky shipboard use for vessels just going into and out of France - they need to obtain special French CDs and special French update systems - they can't receive a CD with French data and Spanish data mixed together. SUBHEAD Encryption standards There are still problems with lack of international agreement on encryption standards, which is making shipboard life very complex with seafarers receiving a number of different CDs all with different encryption keys, and in some cases the same chart file sent to the ship twice via different routes with different encryption schemes on the file. Charts from the IC-ENC [UK] group are not encrypted at all, or encrypted in a proprietary encryption system ["SENC"] made by a chart supplier, whilst all Primar Stavanger charts are encrypted. This has led to shipboard computers crashing, or throwing up error messages, with ships unable to convince port state control or vetting inspectors that they are being adequately updated, leading to potential detentions. Primar Stavanger's proposed solution is that all other chart distribution routes use the same encryption system as Primar uses - indeed it has made its encryption system an official IHO ("International Hydrographic Office") standard - but other hydrographic offices have not yet agreed to this. This would be a workable solution in that a chart file would arrive on the ship with the same encryption standard no matter which route it found its way to the ship, but only if there was international agreement. A further option is that Primar agrees to supply encrypted data to chart suppliers which have an approved encryption format of their own - "SENC", a facility currently used by C-MAP and Transas - ChartWorld is trying to get approval for its own SENC format too. This means that C-MAP and Transas can put together world packages of electronic charts and updates which are easy to use onboard ship, for example providing all the charts and updates for a specific ship voyage on one CD-ROM, all set up to be very easy to use, just plug in the CD on the ship and its all there. The encryption issue creates more problems with chart updates - a shipowner would like all the chart updates needed for the voyage sent by satcom, with the charts being updated automatically like "Windows Update", printing off automatic reports to show port state control. The current ENC update system is, in many cases, the vessel receiving CDs with all chart updates for a single distribution route (eg one for Primar, one for IC-ENC) with the computer expected to pick off the updates it needs. If the shipboard ECDIS crashes and needs to be reinstalled, the headache is enormous, because the shipowner has to find the floppy disk with all the encryption keys on it, and it is generally lost. SUBHEAD International agreement on raster There is still no agreement on whether raster charts can be used for navigation. Everybody accepts that raster charts is second best to ENCs, and should only be used when ENCs are not available - the problem is that for much of the world, ENCs are still not available and so it is either raster charts or paper charts. Currently the UKHO and Australia, both big producers of raster charts, believe that ships should be allowed to navigate using raster charts, where ENCs are not available. This is also covered in SOLAS. This would enable ships to go completely electronic. Norway in particular is a big opponent of raster charts, saying that they are not adequate for navigation in Norway, with many small islands and underwater rocks. Norway has shown a willingness to compromise, saying that whilst raster charts could be used in other areas of the world they are particularly unsuitable in Norway due to the narrow channels which might not be clearly seen on raster charts due to problems zooming in. But now Norway has ENCs produced for nearly the whole of its coastline, and everybody is agreement that ENCs should be used in preference to raster charts whenever they are available. So the issue of Norway being reluctant to allow raster charts for navigation around its own coastline is maybe not really relevant. Meanwhile the Paris Memorandum of Port State Control, which sets standard requirements for European port state control inspectors including Norway, says that ships should be allowed to carry raster charts subject to having a specifically defined number of paper charts in back-up. SBHEAD Future of the HOs There are some serious questions which should be asked about the future of the hydrographic offices - particularly since drawing an electronic chart (ENC) does not require the same level of human skill ("cartography") as drawing a paper chart. It ought to be possible to produce ENCs automatically from the survey data, with some human input to monitor the quality of the surveying and chart production, but not actually draw the chart. Indeed the UKHO has made some steps in this direction by developing a standard communications language for chart data from surveyors, called "Geography Markup Language" or GML, enabling the data to be compiled more easily into electronic charts. An important role of the HOs in the future will be procuring funding from governments to pay for surveys, since most people agree that chart making is too expensive to be self-financing.