I saw this video posted yesterday on the e-Navigation LinkedIn group.
Before I switch tacts, this does look like a well done video judging from the promo. We definitely need works like this to push things forward. The S1xx standards work has got so many people confused and there are a lot of moving pieces.
However...
Sorry to be negative, but I gotta say it. I'm a little confused by the promo trailer. To me, ECDIS is stuck back in the late 1990's. It's not very new or radical... there is so much frustration around lack of innovation because of the quagmire of slow moving standards and really bad/closed/expensive testing and approval process. That's just my take as someone who tried to help the ECDIS world get better. Why we trust massive ships to ECDIS and MS Windows is beyond me. Then I sat in on ECDIS training for a class and was even more disheartened. When I picked up one of the leading watch standing books back in 2009, there was not even a mention of AIS or any of these other key electronics that mariners count on. How are the mariners supposed to know if this stuff is working correctly if there reference books don't even mention it? I have been on the USCG to release a testing guide for AIS since 2007 and have seen drafts, as recently as 2009/10, but where is this material? How do you know if your fancy electronic systems are all individually working and working together properly? And how do you know what is in the most recent chart updates and the data coming in over digital radios (AIS, etc) is valid? Maybe that's covered somewhere (in the full video?), but I really don't know where. It took the USCG almost 3 years to notice a class B AIS in NH (on a NOAA owed / university operated ship) having the wrong MMSI... one with a prefix for a small island nation.
To top it off, the wikipedia entry for ECDIS is terrible. I try to contribute to the AIS page as much as I can, but I'm not expert enough (or have the time to get up to speed) to do much with ECDIS. It would be a great student project to write a massively improved version of this page.
Most of the innovation has been happening in the unregulated ECS, Portable Pilot Unit (PPS), mobile (iOS and Android phones/tablets), etc. OpenCPN had support for the IMO Circ 289 Area Notice before any ECDIS and I'm not sure that any ECDIS has even begun. One ECDIS vender even participated in the RTCM working group that developed the initial work that got turned into IMO's Circ 289. ECDIS appears to me as a land of both stagnation and fragmentation (fragstation?).
I've tried to make an open impact on this kind of stuff, but we need more people to contribute.
My 2009 visit to Kings Point.
Before I switch tacts, this does look like a well done video judging from the promo. We definitely need works like this to push things forward. The S1xx standards work has got so many people confused and there are a lot of moving pieces.
However...
Sorry to be negative, but I gotta say it. I'm a little confused by the promo trailer. To me, ECDIS is stuck back in the late 1990's. It's not very new or radical... there is so much frustration around lack of innovation because of the quagmire of slow moving standards and really bad/closed/expensive testing and approval process. That's just my take as someone who tried to help the ECDIS world get better. Why we trust massive ships to ECDIS and MS Windows is beyond me. Then I sat in on ECDIS training for a class and was even more disheartened. When I picked up one of the leading watch standing books back in 2009, there was not even a mention of AIS or any of these other key electronics that mariners count on. How are the mariners supposed to know if this stuff is working correctly if there reference books don't even mention it? I have been on the USCG to release a testing guide for AIS since 2007 and have seen drafts, as recently as 2009/10, but where is this material? How do you know if your fancy electronic systems are all individually working and working together properly? And how do you know what is in the most recent chart updates and the data coming in over digital radios (AIS, etc) is valid? Maybe that's covered somewhere (in the full video?), but I really don't know where. It took the USCG almost 3 years to notice a class B AIS in NH (on a NOAA owed / university operated ship) having the wrong MMSI... one with a prefix for a small island nation.
To top it off, the wikipedia entry for ECDIS is terrible. I try to contribute to the AIS page as much as I can, but I'm not expert enough (or have the time to get up to speed) to do much with ECDIS. It would be a great student project to write a massively improved version of this page.
Most of the innovation has been happening in the unregulated ECS, Portable Pilot Unit (PPS), mobile (iOS and Android phones/tablets), etc. OpenCPN had support for the IMO Circ 289 Area Notice before any ECDIS and I'm not sure that any ECDIS has even begun. One ECDIS vender even participated in the RTCM working group that developed the initial work that got turned into IMO's Circ 289. ECDIS appears to me as a land of both stagnation and fragmentation (fragstation?).
I've tried to make an open impact on this kind of stuff, but we need more people to contribute.
My 2009 visit to Kings Point.