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Old 01-26-2014, 09:42 AM   #8
Jeffrey S
Scraping Paint
 
City: Full-time onboard
Vessel Model: Trawler
Join Date: Oct 2007
Posts: 929
Quote:
Originally Posted by psneeld View Post
It would be a hard bargain for the government to charge for e-charts when a huge amount of relevant data is being produced by the end consumer.
There are some efforts going on to create open sourced nautical charts - check out:
http://www.openseamap.org/

Today, satellite imagery of the coastline and normal open street maps have better accuracy than nautical chart coastline edges. Overlay buoy locations and soundings potentially generated from each other's tracks and we all can produce pretty good recreational charts. There are even some satellites now that can read depth information. If the data from those ever becomes public, we can have incredibly great charts without a government involved (except for the satellite!).

I have a feeling that in the future, we'll find it odd that we once paid for nautical charts much like it's rare to pay for street maps today. I threw out my Rand McNally map books about 8 years ago.
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