S-100 Data-as-a-Service: How the CHS Leverages the New S-100 Paradigm

With the help of the Electronic Chart Centre (ECC) and other industry players, the Canadian Hydrographic Service (CHS) develops and implements an innovative bathymetry data service demonstrating the value of the new S-100 data standards.

Customers do not simply buy products anymore, they buy services. Just think of how Netflix or Spotify disrupted the film industry and music industry, respectively, by shifting the focus from selling products to selling services. Modern businesses do not sell products, they sell services.

The same goes for the maritime industry. Forward-thinking hydrographic offices are increasingly moving from product-centric to data-centric workflows and services. Leveraging the new S-100 paradigm, modern hydrographic offices transition to a data-as-a-service model to deliver dynamic hydrographic information and quickly produce high-resolution electronic navigation charts (ENCs) and navigational products for efficient and safe ship operations.

The Canadian Hydrographic Service (CHS) is a leader in this large-scale industry transition. With the help of the Electronic Chart Centre (ECC) and other industry players, the CHS will deliver a new and innovative data service for S-100 products.

Canada’s Ocean Protection Plan

Canada is a maritime nation with vast maritime terrain and the world’s largest coastline, relying on waterways for recreation and delivering products to market. To ensure their waters and coasts stay clean and safe for future generations, the Government of Canada has invested $1.5 billion over five years to develop a world-leading marine safety system that protects Canada’s coasts.

A crucial part of this five-year plan was to make navigation safer by implementing emerging IHO S-100 standards in key areas, ensuring that Canada navigation geospatial services would be compatible with the rest of the world.

To realise this ambition, the Canadian Hydrographic Service (CHS) develops new charting and electronic navigation tools for Canadian ports, allowing ships to operate more efficiently and safely. This new initiative allowed the CHS to deliver dynamic hydrographic information and quickly produce high-resolution electronic navigational charts (ENCs) and navigational products.

As a result, over 20 of Canada’s highest traffic commercial ports and waterways, covering two-thirds of Canada’s total cargo vessel traffic, have access to updated navigational information.

Read also: The Ultimate Guide to S-100 Data and Products 

S-100 Data-as-a-Service

The CHS initiative is part of the emerging S-100 era, a crucial factor in the digitalisation of the world of hydrographic data. The new S-100 framework will work as a platform on which a range of new products and applications can be built to cater to various maritime end-user needs – detailed bathymetric data, water level information, surface currents, marine protected areas and under keel clearance management, to mention just a few.

With a multitude of data sources readily available, the use of authoritative data services is essential to improve navigation safety. S-100 enables this approach removing barriers between different departments in delivering deconflicted data services that clients can count on.

Read more about S-100 data and products here.

Accommodating the industry-wide shift from product-centric to data-centric workflows and services, the CHS now leverages innovative technology to develop an end-to-end S-100 service consisting of software that ensures uploading, hosting, managing and delivery of S-100 data and products.

The S-100 Value Chain End-to-End

To develop and implement the new and innovative data service for S-100 products, the CHS collaborated with the ECC/PRIMAR and Teledyne Geospatial to efficiently distribute high-resolution hydrographic data to end-users via a novel subscription service. The challenge was to revamp to full chain from data producer to users and apply cutting edge methods at each step of the way to achieve scalability, low latency and reliability in a standardized manner. Each party brings necessary competence to the collaboration:

• The Canadian Hydrographic Service (CHS) is the authoritative data producer, collecting and generating hydrographic data from implemented sensors in various waterways.

• Teledyne CARIS provides the necessary geospatial and hydrographic software for data processing and S-102 production and efficiently moves the data generated by the CHS to the distribution network supplied by ECC and PRIMAR.

• The ECC (functioning as the distribution technology expert) and PRIMAR (functioning as the distribution business expert) provide the ENC distribution software and the right channel to the market, respectively, selling both to commercial and national distributors, who quickly can distribute S-100 products to end-users.

The service focuses on the latest technological approaches to leverage key opportunities for tomorrow’s hydrographic industry:

• The service leverages a solution that automatically creates S-100 products based on data generated by the CHS and automatically uploads these products into a new cloud solution developed by Teledyne Geospatial. This cloud solution leverages the latest open geospatial approaches and computing techniques.

• Additionally, the service utilises a database consisting of 15 000 ENCs from 60 countries, continuously updated with new data and expanded to support S-102 bathymetry. ECC/PRIMAR accesses the latest and most up-to-date products uploaded in Teledyne CARIS’ cloud solution and makes them available in a subscription-based application delivering ENCs and S-100 products to distributors quickly and efficiently.

Read also: Helping the Canadian Hydrographic Service (CHS) Leverage S-100 Data

International collaboration brings unique challenges but forces the use of standards. In return, the potential of global standardized services in the maritime domain are beyond what we can imagine today.

Together, the CHS, Teledyne Geospatial and ECC/PRIMAR help define the model for future hydrographic products and services. The service successfully fills the gap between survey and ENCs to access high-definition bathymetry. Distributors and end-users looking to access up-to-date bathymetric data can now begin to leverage the opportunities inherent in the S-100 paradigm through an efficient and innovative self-service portal.

Want to learn out more about the S-100? We have created a Quick Guide to S-100 for anyone who is interested, download the guide by clicking the button below.