The objective of the project is to create a system for enhanced surveying of coastal waters through using standard navigation equipment, as an alternative to the standard approach of using specialist Hydrographic surveyors and high precision instruments. Instead, we use a large amount of data logged by vessels carrying out their normal business, and later uploaded to our server for processing. By using a large amount of data, the errors from using less accurate instruments can be removed. We believe this can be developed to provide a cost effective system that will enable much of the shortfall in surveys to be made up.

The benefits of this are safer navigation to all vessels in coastal waters, in particular to the leisure, fishing and workboat sectors, and also greater information for the GIS community, coastal engineers, port, harbour and waterway authorities, and applications such as tide power or offshore wind farms.

The system will use GPS receivers equipped with EGNOS to provide the required level of positional accuracy, and will use statistical techniques to remove errors from depth measurements from echo sounders that cannot otherwise be resolved.

The data logged will be available both as survey data and as chart data. It will be made available in the IHO S-100 format, which is suited to chart creation by Hydrographic Offices and to the wider GIS community, including use in OGC Web Map Servers and Web Feature Servers.