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Welcome to the membership pages of the IC-ENC Website.
As chairman of the IC-ENC Steering Committee, I am privileged to represent the IC-ENC Community of National Hydrographic Organisations who are working closely together in order to establish a combined quality ENC-Database. We are co-operating with our commercial partners who provide a variety of world-wide "one-stop-shopping" services to the mariners including, if needed, any supplementing data.
ECDIS has been designed by IMO to enhance safety of navigation at sea, and it is the only system that may be approved, when operating on official ENCs, for paperless navigation. It is our common goal to promote the use of ECDIS in the interest of safer navigation by joining our forces to create a consistent, quality-assured ENC-database and to support the provision of reliable and user-friendly services for the mariner.
The production of such a consistent and coherent ENC-database made up of ENCs from a variety of HOs is a challenge. Our membership has concluded that the best way to achieve this is through regional co-operation based on the principles of the International Hydrographic Organisation for a World-wide ENC Database (WEND). We have called our international co-operation, its organisational structure, together with its quality-certified procedures and tools the International Centre for ENCs (IC-ENC).
Our regional IC-ENC-members meet on a regular basis through various working groups to co-ordinate our production activities, and to discuss the many issues surrounding ENCs to ensure that we harmonise our policies. This exchange of experience and ideas has proved particularly valuable to all concerned.
Furthermore, we have a growing number of regional operational units that coordinate the quality assurance of all our ENCs and the controlled distribution of the combined ENC-database to companies with experience in providing customer-friendly chart services to the maritime community.
IC-ENC welcomes new members who share the same concerns and wish to make their ENC-Data available to the market as part of the same consistent and coherent data base.
We are also happy to offer help and support to other hydrographic organisations looking to develop their own ENC-production or establish their own regional co-ordination centre within the IC-ENC framework.
Captain Floor de Haan
Hydrographer
Dienst der Hydrografie, The Netherlands
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