OREANDA-NEWS. June 14, 2012. This was officially announced at the workshop for captains and ship owners, which was held on June 2 as a part of the business programme within the Baltic Marine Festival at Lenexpo.

The Fund was launched this June by the Federal Agency of Maritime and River Transport on the basis of the Federal State Unitary Enterprise ‘Mapping and Information Technology.’ It was created under the programme aiming to equip large ships with electronic chart display and information systems (ECDIS), and within the federal target program GLONASS.

At the first stage, the Fund is the world's largest collection of digital nautical charts of inland waterways of the Russian Federation, which will be supplemented with maps of marine areas. In addition, to ensure current navigational and hydrographic information for skippers, the Fund will actively cooperate with the Office of Navigation and Oceanography of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation and with the  Rosreestr, as well as with foreign hydrographic offices.

The Director-General of the Russian Development Centre of Jeppesen Marine Sergey Gubernatorov said: "About 40% of navigational accidents occur due to the loss of orientation by the skipper. ECDIS allows to determinate coordinates quickly and accurately, and also sets the vessel position into the electronic map". However, he does not recommend to rely solely on the ECDIS.  "For a more reliable result skippers need to combine the use of mapping systems, radar and shall not forget about the eye survey", he added.  Despite such clear advantages as the scope and speed of navigation data delivery, the digital maps system still requires technical perfection. For perfect work all existing maps of the World Ocean are to be updated and the regular collection of information is to  be established, since data on some sites have not been updated since the time of James Cook’s voyages.