What We Do
We supply our Henry navigation system to a wide range of customers at home and abroad, including the UK Hydrographic Office,
the Royal Navy, the RNLI, the Mediterranean Shipping Company, BP and hundreds of customers in the North Sea,
the UK military and overseas hydrographic offices.
We produce high quality software for major companies, such as the award-winning TotalTide, Digital List of Lights
and EasyTide for the UK Hydrographic Office.
We produce and supply software technologies to support OEMs in the form of developer toolkits, for example,
in support of AtoBviaC's distance tables produced for BP.
We continuously develop, maintain and adapt our code base to provide an accurate, robust and flexible library of features that are
instantly available to software we produce.
We specialise in working in partnership with larger organisations to realise the market potential of available technology.
Experience
Marine data management
- Storing large volumes of geographic data.
- Custom workflows for managing and verifying data, controlling access, and providing audit trails.
- Fully automated creation of print-ready files for paper publishing
- Digital publishing to offline customers via custom client software.
- Digital publishing for use by OEMs via an SDK.
- High performance services for publishing data to the web.
- Integration with third-party GIS services such as Google Earth.
- Publishing incremental data updates.
- Security systems for published data.
COTS applications
- Usability and user interface design
- High performance raster and vector chart rendering.
- Chart formats
- S-57 (ENC and AML), ARCS, NTF, Shapefiles, BSB, ASRP, CRP, GRP, CADRG, CIB, geotiff, VPF (DNC, VMap, UVMap).
- Commercial encrypted formats — ENC, BSB, ARCS (inc AUS & NZ). Support for multiple providers (IC-ENC, Primar, ChartWorld). S63.
- Custom symbologies.
- Integration of secure online data delivery services
- Integration of multiple data types
- NMEA interfacing — position, gyro, ARPA, AIS, etc.
- Secure software licensing and enforcement systems.
Geographical
- Geodesy. True geodesic and rhumb lines on the ellipsoid. Spherical and cylindrical geometry
- Magnetic model.
- Astronomical (earth, sun, moon) calculations.
- Horizontal datum conversions, 3, and 7 term.
- Grid conversions — national grids (e.g. OS and North African grids) and world wide grids (e.g. MGRS)
- Map projections and their relevance to computer displays.
- Chart generators — creating charts from images with manual geo-referencing.
- Tidal calculations — full harmonic, SHM, non-harmonic, ports and streams.
Technologies
- Developing high-performance multithreaded server components, and hosting, managing and monitoring them if necessary. We have particular experience with SOAP, ASP.NET and C#, as well as databases including Oracle and SQL Server.
- We do the majority of our client-side development in modern standards-conforming C++, making heavy use of STL and the highly regarded Boost libraries. It's C++ (with GDI+) that gives us the raw power behind our high-performance chart drawing. We're also fans of C# when performance is less of an issue. But we believe in using the right tool for the right job, and to that end we have used COM, SQL, VB.NET, Python, C, VB6 and even FORTRAN where appropriate.
- We've worked with XML/XSLT to generate a variety of custom output formats including OpenDocument. We've also generated print-ready InDesign output.