ICA-Adv Advances in Cartography and GIScience of the ICA ICA-Adv Adv. Cartogr. GIScience Int. Cartogr. Assoc. 2570-2084 Copernicus Publications Göttingen, Germany 10.5194/ica-adv-5-17-2025 Sailing the Rough Seas of Automated Electronic Navigational Charts Compilation Kastrisios Christos 1 Dyer Noel M. 2 Nada Tamer 1 Calder Brian R. 1 Martinez Brian 2 Ence Christie 2 De Floriani Leila 3 Masetti Giuseppe 1 Contarinis Stelios 4 Holmberg Peter 5 Bartlett Megan 2 Greene Craig 6 Cordero Jose 7 O’Neill Kathryn 2 Legeer Sean 2 Bethell Amber 6 Morrow Daniel 2 University of New Hampshire, Center for Coastal and Ocean Mapping/UNH-NOAA Joint Hydrographic Center, Durham, NH, USA NOAA, Office of Coast Survey, Marine Chart Division, Silver Spring, MD, USA University of Maryland, Department of Geographical Sciences, MD, USA Cartography Laboratory, National Technical University of Athens, 15780 Athens, Greece NOAA, Office of Coast Survey, Hydrographic Survey Division, Seattle, WA, USA Esri, Marine & Topographic Production Division, Redlands, CA, USA Instituto Hidrografico de la Marina, Spanish Navy, 11007 Cadiz, Spain 20 10 2025 5 17 Copyright: © 2025 Christos Kastrisios et al. 2025 This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this licence, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This article is available from https://ica-adv.copernicus.org/articles/5/17/2025/ica-adv-5-17-2025.html The full text article is available as a PDF file from https://ica-adv.copernicus.org/articles/5/17/2025/ica-adv-5-17-2025.pdf

Advancements in geospatial technology have benefited the hydrographic and maritime professions in many ways. Yet, compared to hydrographic data collection and processing, chart compilation workflows remain relatively slow, mainly due to limited human resources and the availability of automated algorithms that respect nautical charting constraints and Electronic Navigational Chart (ENC) database requirements. This work presents our research efforts to streamline the nautical chart compilation process through the introduction of automated processes and improving the efficiency and accuracy of existing. Among these processes are fundamental generalization tasks such as those for soundings, islands, and depth contours; ENC product specific requirements, such as those for reducing file size through the removal of collinear vertices forming polylines and polygons; and the updating of dependent features in the ENC database after generalization of one of their shared geometries.