Background

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. 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, 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, which resulted in final partitioning for a candidate and full release.

The work continues…

Users

The following organizations (among many others) use the ONSWG library:

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