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BIMCO Feature: Well I wouldn’t start from here
Another year and another conference on the ECDIS Revolution took place in London at the end of November. It was a well-attended, well supported and well provisioned affair, professionally organised and timely as ever in decoding the issues around digital navigation. Except that in this latest iteration, the ECDIS Revolution has become the e-Navigation Revolution, reflecting I suppose rather wider ambitions to capture the spirit and intentions of the IMO’s move towards an environment of shared navigation information and better safety.
In some ways it’s a good idea – getting away from what is frankly a damaged brand and a concept that many embrace, but others still recoil from – and setting a course for the sunny uplands of mandated digital navigation.
Except that to my mind – and I think some of the speakers at the event – e-Navigation is not only some years away from fully seeing the light of day as a “finished product”, it is also unlikely to be a mandated set of rules in the way that ECDIS is, or ballast water, for that matter.
Fundamentally, the same issues remain for digital navigation: GPS vulnerability, the training challenge, the expense, the uncertainty around equipment and the human factor. On a political level, the EU continues to pursue its own e-Maritime strategy, separately from the IMO’s e-Navigation process.
There are positive signs – about the emerging “blue economy” and an awareness of the need not just for safer navigation but marine spatial planning and a joined up supply chain approach. Shipping, it seems, has learned much of this on the back foot, as plans emerge and take shape without much consultation, but it does at least seem to have taken lessons about how to get in the room when the discussions take place.
Sadly there are “new” problems too, though really they are pre-existing and have come to light more clearly as the move towards digital navigation gains speed. First of these is a very old problem – the fact that recent survey activity has been extremely limited, leaving some crucial seaways reliant on a combination of very old surveys and up to date corrections.
The corrections, too, are an issue of their own. It was a point made more than once during the event that the need for up to date navigation data will require a crowd-sourcing approach in future. In other words, governments and their hydrographic offices do not have the resources to survey and re-survey their own waters and need to rely on user-generated content (UGC) – feedback from mariners and other users on changes, hazards and potential issues – that can be taken into corrections.
In fact, this has been going on for some time – the world’s largest chart-maker United Kingdom Hydrographic Office, behind the Admiralty brand of global navigational products, encourages such feedback and after vetting and quality control, distributes it in an overlay service which aims to provide as close as possible to a real time chart update. Sadly, though, this service is commercial rather than mandatory, so if you don’t buy from Admiralty, you won’t get the benefit, despite it being very much in line with the aims of the e-Navigation project.
The chairman of the conference called UGC “a database to die for” though presumably the opposite is the intention. It came as something of a surprise to the open source community on Twitter, who quickly pointed out that this traffic is far too one-way. The ability to share data and source code is something the official and unofficial Geographic Information System community have been calling for some years. The data owners have always resisted, despite protests that since the data is government-owned, they have already paid for it.
That issue aside, quality remains a major problem. So much so in fact, that during a presentation by a pro-ECDIS cruise ship owner, it became clear that had they followed the advice of the ECDIS during an upriver navigation, they would have been onshore for some of the time.
Zones of Confidence simply gave none, when public liability risk could have sunk the company. The next debate, the presenter said, was around chart quality and how that quality was transmitted to the user. These users were losing faith in the equipment and by implication the charts too.
It was not just mariners that required training, he said, but hydrographers too. They need to know how navigation works just as much as mariners need to understand their charts. The point was underlined rather more bluntly, though with typical Scandinavian good humour by a shipmanager, randomising ECDIS as Scary Information Display for Electronic Charts.
Chart suppliers and intermediaries have attempted solutions – improving chart supply with pre-paid packages and attempting to simplify distribution – but as one quipped, one definition of revolution is a process that brings development back to its starting point, rather than one that signifies forward progress. Another pointed out that the pace of technology development was simply outstripping the ability of any government to keep pace.
So acute is the quality problem that an intervention was deemed necessary from a person familiar with the IHO process. The “rushed” migration of chart data from paper to digital had created the situation where old errors were simply incorporated in the new format, creating serious concerns for safety, he said. The IHO was aware and acting on the “inherent flaws” in the S-57 standard and a data quality group was considering how to respond.
Good to know that the issue is a live one, but it hardly lends credibility to arguments that ECDIS is fit for purpose as it stands: in just a few years, mandation will start to bite on the SOLAS main fleet.
One presenter suggested that some in the shipping industry were “in the bubble” of e-Navigation; in other words, so caught up by process that they lacked perspective on the issues and the need to define services for users.
That to me sounds dangerously like the SNAFU that led to the Ballast Water Management Convention – a well-intentioned piece of regulation that because it failed to set cart and horse in the correct order from the start, has put at risk the credibility and authority of the IMO, impacting other regulations in turn.
ECDIS (rather than e-Navigation) may not have that problem yet, but unless some hard truths are faced and soon, it is possible that some flag states might push this up the agenda of issues “up with which they will not put”.
Or to put it another way: you want to navigate from point A to point B on electronic charts? Well I wouldn’t start from here…
Source: BIMCO
In some ways it’s a good idea – getting away from what is frankly a damaged brand and a concept that many embrace, but others still recoil from – and setting a course for the sunny uplands of mandated digital navigation.
Except that to my mind – and I think some of the speakers at the event – e-Navigation is not only some years away from fully seeing the light of day as a “finished product”, it is also unlikely to be a mandated set of rules in the way that ECDIS is, or ballast water, for that matter.
Fundamentally, the same issues remain for digital navigation: GPS vulnerability, the training challenge, the expense, the uncertainty around equipment and the human factor. On a political level, the EU continues to pursue its own e-Maritime strategy, separately from the IMO’s e-Navigation process.
There are positive signs – about the emerging “blue economy” and an awareness of the need not just for safer navigation but marine spatial planning and a joined up supply chain approach. Shipping, it seems, has learned much of this on the back foot, as plans emerge and take shape without much consultation, but it does at least seem to have taken lessons about how to get in the room when the discussions take place.
Sadly there are “new” problems too, though really they are pre-existing and have come to light more clearly as the move towards digital navigation gains speed. First of these is a very old problem – the fact that recent survey activity has been extremely limited, leaving some crucial seaways reliant on a combination of very old surveys and up to date corrections.
The corrections, too, are an issue of their own. It was a point made more than once during the event that the need for up to date navigation data will require a crowd-sourcing approach in future. In other words, governments and their hydrographic offices do not have the resources to survey and re-survey their own waters and need to rely on user-generated content (UGC) – feedback from mariners and other users on changes, hazards and potential issues – that can be taken into corrections.
In fact, this has been going on for some time – the world’s largest chart-maker United Kingdom Hydrographic Office, behind the Admiralty brand of global navigational products, encourages such feedback and after vetting and quality control, distributes it in an overlay service which aims to provide as close as possible to a real time chart update. Sadly, though, this service is commercial rather than mandatory, so if you don’t buy from Admiralty, you won’t get the benefit, despite it being very much in line with the aims of the e-Navigation project.
The chairman of the conference called UGC “a database to die for” though presumably the opposite is the intention. It came as something of a surprise to the open source community on Twitter, who quickly pointed out that this traffic is far too one-way. The ability to share data and source code is something the official and unofficial Geographic Information System community have been calling for some years. The data owners have always resisted, despite protests that since the data is government-owned, they have already paid for it.
That issue aside, quality remains a major problem. So much so in fact, that during a presentation by a pro-ECDIS cruise ship owner, it became clear that had they followed the advice of the ECDIS during an upriver navigation, they would have been onshore for some of the time.
Zones of Confidence simply gave none, when public liability risk could have sunk the company. The next debate, the presenter said, was around chart quality and how that quality was transmitted to the user. These users were losing faith in the equipment and by implication the charts too.
It was not just mariners that required training, he said, but hydrographers too. They need to know how navigation works just as much as mariners need to understand their charts. The point was underlined rather more bluntly, though with typical Scandinavian good humour by a shipmanager, randomising ECDIS as Scary Information Display for Electronic Charts.
Chart suppliers and intermediaries have attempted solutions – improving chart supply with pre-paid packages and attempting to simplify distribution – but as one quipped, one definition of revolution is a process that brings development back to its starting point, rather than one that signifies forward progress. Another pointed out that the pace of technology development was simply outstripping the ability of any government to keep pace.
So acute is the quality problem that an intervention was deemed necessary from a person familiar with the IHO process. The “rushed” migration of chart data from paper to digital had created the situation where old errors were simply incorporated in the new format, creating serious concerns for safety, he said. The IHO was aware and acting on the “inherent flaws” in the S-57 standard and a data quality group was considering how to respond.
Good to know that the issue is a live one, but it hardly lends credibility to arguments that ECDIS is fit for purpose as it stands: in just a few years, mandation will start to bite on the SOLAS main fleet.
One presenter suggested that some in the shipping industry were “in the bubble” of e-Navigation; in other words, so caught up by process that they lacked perspective on the issues and the need to define services for users.
That to me sounds dangerously like the SNAFU that led to the Ballast Water Management Convention – a well-intentioned piece of regulation that because it failed to set cart and horse in the correct order from the start, has put at risk the credibility and authority of the IMO, impacting other regulations in turn.
ECDIS (rather than e-Navigation) may not have that problem yet, but unless some hard truths are faced and soon, it is possible that some flag states might push this up the agenda of issues “up with which they will not put”.
Or to put it another way: you want to navigate from point A to point B on electronic charts? Well I wouldn’t start from here…
Source: BIMCO
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