Abstract
Currently ship navigators must manually pick up necessary navigational information from a vast number of charts and sailing directions. They desire essential information for safe and efficient navigation from them.
In this paper, we propose an automatic retrieval system for Japanese nautical charts and articles of sailing directions, which is composed of a general purpose database, a retrieval algorithm and a user-friendly inter-face. The database contains the labels of 781 sheets of Japanese nautical charts and HTML files of sailing directions' articles. The database of sailing directions contains articles of Seto Inland Sea Sailing Directions. They are classified into 2, 000 areas and items. When the user inputs a navigational route in terms of the departure port, altering points and arrival port on digital chart of his graphic display by a mouse pointer device, the system can retrieve and show relevant charts and articles for the route. Our system can save time considerably, compared with manual operation. Moreover, it retrieves relevant navigational information from the database without anv omissions.
