Office of Coast Survey

TAGGING COAST PILOT TAGGING COAST PILOT FEATURESFEATURES

Tom Loeper, NOAAGreat Lakes Navigation Manager

Chief, Coast Pilot Branch2 July 2015

Office of Coast Survey

Improve the quality of geographic names in NOAA products

Office of Coast Survey

• Goal of the Federal Government dating back to 1890• Creation of the U.S. Board of Geographic Names (BGN)

• Goal was affirmed in 1947• Law formally established the Dept. of Interior and

Department of Defense as co-leads to run the BGN

• Co-leads created 2 official web-based repositories• Law formally established the Dept. of Interior and

Department of Defense as co-leads to run the BGN

First - Some History

Office of Coast Survey

• NOAA uses many types of names that are not consistent• Inconsistent across scale bands

• With official names in the Web-based repositories

• Names on NOAA products are prone to errors• Improper spelling

• Orphaned histories

Some History (cont.)

Office of Coast Survey

• Geographic positions must reflect a real-world location• Not a cartographic label placement

• Must allow for the addition/deletion/change of records between major updates

• Must be formatted to allow web developers search• Must maintain linkages to authoritative sources• Look at a variety of charts and imagery including raster,

vector, satellite and Google Earth

Requirements include

Office of Coast Survey

• Have an ability to flag Coast Pilot names that match official standard names

• Troubleshoot unmatched names• Compare them against variants as well as foreign and undersea feature

names

• Test “fuzzy” string matching techniques to check for errors

• Investigate other authoritative name sources for administrative names• Lights

• Bridges

Modified Vision

Office of Coast Survey

Selection Criteria<CP_INDEX TEXT="Avery Point 13213">Avery Point</CP_INDEX>

Office of Coast Survey

Program Interface

Pick Books 1 through 9, Test Book or the common chapter 1

Filter by All, Exclude Skipped, Ignored Only or Skipped Only

Only 10 selections presented at one time

Office of Coast Survey

Office of Coast Survey

Other Features

• The Production System automatically identifies the chart using imbedded chart tags

• Results are updated every week when the books are created

• HTML files are “clickable” color-coded as green text

• Link opens a small raster chartlet with the geo-tagged position at the center of the image

• The user can switch to between raster and vector images

Office of Coast Survey

Geotag is centered on the image

Choice of Raster or Vector Image

Results are color-coded in a legend

Office of Coast Survey

• What to tag next?• Extending this to other web-based tools including

• NOAA’s Historic Map Collection

• The online NOAA Chart Viewer

• NOAA’s ENC to GIS tool

• Adjust data structure (Briana Sullivan)• Move away from traditional book format

• Move towards a more data-centric format

Where do we want to go from here?

Office of Coast Survey

Tom Loeper, NOAAGreat Lakes Navigation ManagerChief, Coast Pilot Branch

http://www.nauticalcharts.noaa.gov/

Cell: (301)367-5680E-mail: thomas.loeper@noaa.gov