| The Office of Coast Survey is continuing an effort aimed at modernizing the Coast Pilot through enhancements including on-line automatic updating, expanding its content sources, improving the quality of content, data sharing and adding Internet display. In order to realize theseresults, the Coast Survey is attempting to design a new production system with enhancements over the existing product by linking to associated NOAA services, and allowing for private industry interactions to develop value-added products. The Coast Pilot project needs increased data management capability in order to share its information with other sources and offer a customizable product. For example, a mariner might be interested in information regarding all small craft facilities in the San Francisco Bay, or the NOAA Electronic Navigational Charting Program may wish to extract Federal regulations for a set of specific geographic coordinates. This degree of customization requires more control than a traditional Desktop Publisher (DTP) or database system can provide, but the Extensible Markup Language (XML) and associated tools have that capability. |
