COASTCHART

The objective of the COASTCHART project was first to develop an information system for the provision of coastline restitution products that would support the work of hydrographic organisations in their activities related to the cartographic actualisation of marine charts, and second to demonstrate and qualify the COASTCHART information system by operating the system on the entire West African Coast from Senegal to Congo (6,000 km of coastline).

The following coastal products were requested to be produced and validated during the COASTCHART project:

1. High Resolution Coastline Restitution Products (at 1:50,000 scale), in paper maps and digital formats, for the overall West African coast composed of the following 15 countries: Senegal, The Gambia, Guinea Bissau, Guinea, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Ivory Coast, Ghana, Togo, Benin, Nigeria, Cameroon, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon and Republic of the Congo;
    
2. Very High Resolution Coastline Restitution Product (at 1:15,000 scale), in paper maps and digital formats, for 12 key coastal areas (typically harbour infrastructures, maritime facilities and river approaches);

The Coastline Restitution product contained multi-date geo-referenced vector objects that characterise the coastline. Each coastline object was precisely geo-referenced and characterised by thematic attributes that identify the type of coastlines, following the semantics defined in the S-57 standard available from the International Hydrographic Organisation (IHO).

The COASTCHART products aimed at supporting the hydrographic offices in the production of nautical documents. The generation of these marine charts is the responsibility of the hydrographic offices and was therefore beyond the scope of the COASTCHART project.