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The Open Navigation Surface (ONS) project came about because of the growing popularity of
gridded bathymetry products in the hydrographic product pipeline. Adoption of gridded
bathymetry allows for new methods of data reduction, archive, databasing and product
creation which can be significantly more powerful than traditional methods. However,
there was no extant format for transfering the required information about the
bathymetry and its associated uncertainty and other features (e.g., hydrographic
operator modifications for safety of navigation, meta-data) between different
processing packages. The ONS project is a way to fill this gap; the object of the
project starting was to define a file format that has the appropriate components to
transfer all of the information inherent in a processed bathymetric object, and to
develop a source code base to implement this format.
Starting with the establishment of e-mail lists hosted at
the Center for Coastal and Ocean Mapping at the
University of New Hampshire, a Call for Participation
was issued and a meeting was held at
CCOM/JHC on 21-23 January 2004
(DOWNLOAD [65k]).
The meeting, which had participants from NOAA,
NAVO, IVS,
CARIS, SAIC,
SevenCs, and
CCOM/JHC defined the requirements and
structure for the ONS format, known as the Bathymetric Attributed Grid (BAG), and
partitioned the work for the members of the group in order to build a working example
of how to read and write the file, with associated source-code that could be made
freely available to all interested parties.
A second meeting was held again at CCOM/JHC on 18-22 July 2005
(DOWNLOAD [22k]), which
resulted in a first build-out of the library source and in subsequent work, the first
BAG file being created. This BAG file was demonstrated at
Shallow Survey 2005 in
CARIS HIPS, IVS Fledermaus,
and SAIC SABER using the alpha library.
A third (teleconference) meeting was hosted by SAIC teleconferences
on 2006-01-17 (DOWNLOAD [32k]),
which resulted in final partitioning for a candidate and full release.
The work continues...
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