Naval Charts | Hacker News Reader

Naval Charts

map.openseamap.org

89 pointsvinnyglennon19 comments

It is hard to check if you don't have a map to check against, but in the waters I used to sail in Norway, all lighthouses seems to be there, but no rocks or areas with shallow water are marked, which makes the map useless for navigation there. This may come, but before it is there, it's not safe to navigate using these maps.

I also dislike that the line extending from the lighthouse sectors are not drawn, as that is very useful when navigating at night. They do have the intervals of the light houses, which is good. They also have a download function, which is important at sea, since you cannot expect to be online at all times at sea, but I did not get it to work. Since I've always used paper maps on sea, I can't tell if they have the right download formats if it should work.

All in all it is a nice testbed for testing out concepts, but still not ready for prime time. A sea map has much more stringent requirements for accuracy than street maps, and this still below the bar.

Even for the data that is there, the presentation could be improved: you have to zoom in a lot before light signatures are displayed, for example.

Edit: It would be useful if you could see these by clicking on the corresponding light, without needing to zoom in.

To be honest, this isn't any more detailed for the waters where I sail (NY/CT/MA) than Google Maps. I.e. not detailed at all.

There are free official NOAA chart available online: http://www.charts.noaa.gov/

for US-waters there are free charts. For other waters one has to pay dearly! e.g. maps for Mallorca, Ibiza, Menorca, Formentera 55€

I'm a bit confused. I was excited to click the link, but they look nothing like the admiralty charts that I grew up with sailing. In fact the water areas seem to have no detail at all. I enabled all layers.

This is what a chart used for navigation in sailing looks like today:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0a/NOAA_char...

Notice specifically the depths throughout.

It's a really great start. I have looked for an initiative like this one for a long time. I'm a french sailor and were I live marine charts are not free like in America with NOAA. In fact in most countries in the world charts are not free.

Concerning the depth, it's indeed a very important aspect of the chart but in my opinion it's by far the most difficult to obtain with crowdsourcing. The guys at Openseamap seem to have made a piece of hardware just for that purpose (http://www.ak-modul-bus.de/cgi-bin/iboshop.cgi?show1100,5708...).

Keep on the good work guys, we need an open source solution for naval charts. Thanks.

While it's a good project, it's far from being usable speaking as a skipper. I use Navionics on my Ipad for a chartplotter. I'm trying to get started with OpenCPN on my macbook air, but getting navigational charts which are compatible for Europe is proving troublesome.

It's a nice mapping site, but how do these qualify as charts? Am I missing something? I didn't see any depth or current information, aids to navigation, etc.

Ah sorry, missed the toolbar. Looks like depth marks, at least are appearing over land and not over water. They're labeled 'beta' so I can't throw stones. Anyway, I am all for access to good charts, but until these can be used for actual navigation they aren't really charts. More like maps based on chart data.

I'm not a sea captain or anything, but I find it interesting that there is little reference or comparison to S-57/S-63 data (vector-based nautical chart standard maintained by the International Hydrographic Association) in either scope or in terms of future goals. The site is loading slow for me so I didn't get a chance to extensively navigate, from the couple of tile I managed to see I couldn't see any depth information (sounding data). In theory, there is some potential here because the S-57 is an old format ill-suited for the web or desktop-based systems for that matter. They are in the process or revamping the format (S-101), but we all know how well top-down committee based formats are designed. Any bottom-up format that spreads and proves itself in the field would be exciting...But it'll be interesting what the open source data movement could do to in this area that could disrupt the vast network of national hydrographic associations that update the depth values of the world's oceans on a weekly and monthly basis and sell them to sea vessels the world over.

I recommend moving to openlayers 3 (http://openlayers.org) - it's not backward compatible with OL2, but the improvement in user interaction and tile display is worth it, especially on mobile targets.

(not affiliated, but use it heavily for my own projects)

I'd be interested in how you're using OL3 in your projects.

I looked at some Great Lakes areas I haven't sailed on in 30 years, brings back some memories.

I can imagine market fragmentation. Much as google maps is not likely to put either aviation or topo map makers out of business, there is probably some market for "sailors just screwing around". There is space for something other than "on board ship naval chart replacement" yet more "maritime" focused than google maps.

I just wanted to point out the "Marine Traffic" layer, which appearantly shows real-time positions of vessels. For example, off the coast of NJ I spotted this tug: http://www.marinetraffic.com/ais/details/ships/368468000/ves...

You might like https://www.marinetraffic.com/ itself ;)

If you look around the site a little bit, you find that this is actually just a maritime-oriented rendering of data from OpenStreetMap. Not as usable as professional, commercial maps, but still not too bad.

Hopefully this encourages more mapping of features not on land for OpenStreetMap, just as OpenCycleMap has helped the availability of cycling data.

Really nice, although the site seems to load somewhat slow for me...

What is naval about these charts? They look like maritime or sea charts to me. (Naval is the adjective form of navy, the oceangoing arm of a military.)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com