IHO S-57 (ENC)

IHO S-57 datasets are supported for read access.

The S-57 driver module produces features for all S-57 features in one or more related S-57 data files. An S-57 dataset can be a directory (in which case all S-57 files in the directory are selected), an S-57 catalog file (in which case all files referred to from the catalog are selected) or an individual S-57 data file.

S-57 feature objects are translated into features. S-57 geometry objects are automatically collected and formed into geometries on the features. Geometry objects are not separately accessable with the S-57 reader.

The S-57 reader depends on having two supporting files, s57objectclasses.csv, and s57attributes.csv available at runtime in order to translate features in an object class specific manner. These should be in the directory pointed to by the encironment variable S57_CSV, or in the current working directory.

Note that the S-57 Reader does not support S-57 update files in a useful manner at this time. S-57 update files contain information on how to update a distributed S-57 data file. While they can be read, they are not currently used to create an updated data view of the original file.

There is no update or creation support in the S-57 driver.

Feature Translation

Normally all features read from S-57 are assigned to a layer based on the name of the object class (OBJL) to which they belong. For instance, with an OBJL value of 2, the feature is an "Airport / airfield" and has a short name of "AIRARE" which is used as the layer name. A typical S-57 transfer will have in excess of 100 layers.

Each feature type has a predefined set of attributes as defined by the S-57 standard. For instance, the airport (AIRARE) object class can have the AIRARE, CATAIR, CONDTN, CONVIS, NOBJNM, OBJNAM, STATUS, INFORM, NINFOM, NTXTDS, PICREP, SCAMAX, SCAMIN, TXTDSC, ,RECDAT, RECIND, SORDAT, and SORIND attributes. These short names can be related to longer, more meaningful names using an S-57 object/attribute catalog such as the S-57 standard document itself, or the catalog files (s57attributes.csv, and s57objectclasses.csv). Such a catalog can also be used to establish all the available object classes, and their attributes.

The following are some common attributes, including generic attributes which appear on all feature, regardless of object class. is turned on. 

  Attribute Name  Description                            Defined On
  --------------  -----------                            ----------

  GRUP            Group number.			         All features

  OBJL            Object label code.  This number	 All features
	          indicates the object class of the 
                  feature. 

  RVER            Record version.

  AGEN            Numeric agency code, such as 50 for    All features
                  the Canadian Hydrographic Service.
		  A potentially outdated list is 
		  available in agencode.txt.

  FIDN            Feature identification number.         All features

  FIDS            Feature identification subdivision.    All features

  LNAM            Long name.  An encoding of AGEN,       All features
                  FIDN and FIDS used to uniquely 
                  identify this features within an
                  S-57 file.  

  DSNM            Dataset name.  The name of the file    All features
                  the feature came from.  Used with
                  LNAM to form a unique dataset wide
		  identifier for a feature.

  INFORM          Informational text.                    Some features

  NINFOM	  Informational text in national         Some features
                  language. 

  OBJNAM          Object name				 Some features

  NOBJNM          Object name in national		 Some features
                  language.
                         
  SCAMAX          Maximum scale for display              Some features
 
  SCAMIN          Minimum scale for display              Some features
  
  SORDAT          Source date                            Some features

Soundings

Depth soundings are handled somewhat specially in S-57 format, in order to efficiently represent the many available data points. In S-57 one sounding feature can have many sounding points. The S-57 reader splits each of these out into it's own feature type `SOUNDG' feature with an s57_type of `s57_point3d'. All the soundings from a single feature record will have the same AGEN, FIDN, FIDS and LNAM value.

See Also