About Data

Creating a Sea-Change

The limitations in accessing historic data and the introduction of new technologies has been the driving force behind SeaZone developing and making marine data easily accessible for use in geographic information systems (GIS). SeaZone delivers:

• Data from leading authoritative sources, thereby providing you with highest confidence in data integrity
• Data sourced directly from data owner, ensuring it is the most up-to-date available. Annual or quarterly updates ensure data remains current
• Supporting information including SeaZone metadata, symbols and user manual to help you access and use the data quickly and easily.

History of Data

For centuries the main driver for mapping and understanding our oceans has been for navigation and defence. Since the discovery of oil and gas offshore in the 1960s, followed by increasing regulation and conservation, the need for marine data and information to support a much wider range of activities has expanded considerably. These applications include environment protection, economic development and risk management and mitigation.

However, due to a lack of a strategic approach to marine data acquisition, management and access, public and private sector organisations have been forced to use inadequate (for their purpose) products, such as paper nautical charts, or embark on expensive data collection programmes, resulting in silos of disparate, inconsistent data and a lack of an overall framework and common approach. For many years, users have identified the requirement for consistent, easily accessible data comparable to land mapping but time after time were denied.

Nautical charts contain only a subset data available, depicting information significant for navigation and safety at sea, making them easy to use and assimilate for the navigator, but deficient for many other purposes. Electronic charts are widely available but these are copies of the original and hence suffer from the same shortcomings as their paper counterparts.

Furthermore, these products are encrypted and meant only as input to ECDIS (Electronic Chart Display and Information Systems). Often licensing conditions prevent their use elsewhere and in many cases is illegal.

SeaZone's goal is to create data layers to common standards that are comprehensive and authoritative, that use the best available information and contain associations where these exist in the real world. Reference information provides a base map or the foundation to a common framework, a spatial data infrastructure. SeaZone's ideal is to work with and support data providers, including hydrographic offices, to ensure that the most accurate and consistent data is used. Often this means taking data meant for nautical charting but ensuring whenever possible that source data is used instead and that it is re-engineered to be seamless and structured to support a wide range of different purposes and applications.