HYDRO 2016 Paper 3B1
Charles de Jongh
Rijkswaterstaat (RWS), the executive body of the Ministry of Infrastructure and Environment in the Netherlands, is responsible for the design, construction, management and maintenance of the main infrastructure facilities in the Netherlands. This includes the main waterway network and water systems. Because the Netherlands has one of the most advanced and busy waterway networks in the world, the best possible management is essential, not only for the Netherlands' economy, but also for neighbouring Germany and Belgium. As such RWS maintains a large amount of bathymetric survey data, both of Dutch waterways and the North Sea.
For the implementation of a new national storage system for hydrographic survey data at RWS, CARIS Bathy DataBASE was chosen. Since then legacy data sets and metadata have been converted from the old database to CARIS Bathy DataBASE, recently followed by the creation of a new and efficient automated bathymetric data management workflow.
This presentation will focus on this workflow as it is an example of state-of-the-art techniques, combining both CARIS COTS software and customised scripting.
When new bathymetric data sets are uploaded to an RWS portal, they will be automatically modelled and placed in an import database. An RWS operator will check the bathymetric model, after which it is moved to the bathymetric source database that contains all validated bathymetric data sets (currently around 60,000 data sets). To have the best available representation of the seafloor available per region (e.g. a waterway), multiple source bathymetric data sets are automatically combined on a regular basis, making sure the combined model contains the most recent survey data. The resulting combined data sets are moved to a separate combine database and are accessible using OGC compliant web services for multiple stakeholders, both internally at RWS as well as externally. The combined bathymetric models are the basis for dredging, for assessing the state of maintenance of the waterways, for flood management and scientific research, as well as for the creation of electronic navigation charts.
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