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CherSoft Ltd. (ID: 3353)
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> Company Information > Jobs at CherSoft > Quality Certification > Microsoft Partner > Contact Information > Awards Company Information Our business is the production of bespoke, leading edge software focusing on marine electronic navigation systems. At the core of this business are a family of proven technologies, developed over seven years, which allow the collection, management and coherent display of diverse sorts of marine navigational data, to be integrated into powerful and flexible computing solutions. These technologies are employed in our core navigation system product and software developed for companies such as the UK Hydrographic Office and SML Technologies. Our end users include: UK military RNLI Volvo racing BP Texaco The London Port Authority A growing number of super yachts The coastguards of several countries We are established leaders in the core marine charting market and produce world class software products that empower businesses today and into the future. Quality Certification CherSoft is an ISO 9001 quality certified company Jobs at CherSoft We are looking for top quality people to work with us.... We need people who: Have significant experience and proven technical expertise Have experience in Object Orientated analysis and will be able to contribute towards the overall system design Have a flexible approach to working and are self-motivated Are prepared to develop new skills and techniques Current Vacancies: We do not have any live vacancies at present but are always alert to the opportunity to get suitable people to join our highly skilled team. The skills we require are set out below. Exceptional programmers may send in a speculative enquiry directly to the email address below. Position: C++ Programmer Duration: Full time, Part time or contract Salary: Negotiable Key skills: C++, MFC, Win32, OO Additional skills: ATL, COM, VB Candidates will be asked for a practical example of their programming ability. Position: VB Programmer Duration: Full time, Part time or contract Salary: Negotiable Key skills: VB, HTML, ASP, Database and Data Access Additional skills: COM, .NET, Help Authoring Candidates will be asked for a practical example of their programming ability. If you would like to apply or want more information then please send a CV and covering note to chris@chersoft.co.uk CherSoft's policy on working with recruitment agencies >>> CherSoft builds leading-edge software which has been recognised by the marine navigation community in the awards CherSoft products have received. Lloyds List SMM Awards 2002 (Shipbuilding, Machinery and Marine Technology) Innovation in Communication and Information Technology - TotalTide 2002 CITIS Awards (Communications and IT in Shipping) Innovation in IT for Ship Operation - Runner Up - TotalTide MEN 2001 Awards (Marine Equipment News) Award for Excellence and Innovation in the Marine Equipment Supply Sector - TotalTide Quality Certification Quality is central to everything we do. CherSoft is an ISO9001TickIT registered company Certificate No 990509. We recently upgraded our certification to ISO9001:2000 in June 2002. It is the policy of CherSoft to provide a service that fully and consistently meets the needs and expectations and agreed requirements of its customers. To demonstrate the company's commitment to quality to both customers and staff, CherSoft has achieved recognition as a company of assessed quality capability under the requirements of BS/EN/ISO 9001:2000. The Quality Policy of CherSoft is implemented through the operation of a Quality Management System. Plans to bring about continual improvements in quality and productivity are key business objectives and are specifically focused on enhancing quality through the adoption of positive techniques. The only way to achieve and maintain this policy is for every employee, in whatever capacity, to perform his or her work to the highest standards at all times. Our aim is to get it right first time and strive for continuous improvements. Products CherSoft create a range of software products based on our core technologies. Our flagship product is the "Henry" Navigation System but we also market a range of complementing software products for chart management and creation. These include ChartGen, a fully-extensible chart conversion and creation application that allow a wide range of charts formats to be used with the "Henry" Navigation System. Additonally we develop products for other businesses, normally won through competative tender and designed and developed in partnership the business. These products can be created quickly and with enhanced functionality as we are able to use our large library of technologies to provide an effective solution. Examples are the TotalTide and Digital List of Lights products which CherSoft developed for the United Kingdom Hydrographic Office. "Henry" Navigation System A professional Windows application for marine navigation and charting. The "Henry" Navigation System is a robust 32-bit Microsoft Windows application for 95/98/NT/2000 and XP, it has been in development for over eight years and is tightly integrated with Windows. It is a joint development with SML Technolgies Ltd. who use it as the basis for a range of systems that they market such as Safe Navigator. The system is currently undergoing ECDIS type approval. Key Features The Application High performance Advanced user-friendly interface Highly configurable and customisable Communications and Interfaces GPS and Gyro interface (NEMA) Radar interface (ARPA) Proposed WeatherText input and weather overlay display Chart Display ARCS display and updating S57 vector chart display and updating CRP chart display NOAA (BSB/Maptech) raster chart display Route Planning and Navigation Distance and Timing calculation Chart annotation (points, lines boundaries) Great Circle and Rhumb lines Parallel indexing and clearance bearings Alarms and warnings system (cross-track errors, boundary warnings, etc.) -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Initially Henry was developed to support the UKHO ARCS charts which were the only official electronic raster chart data available. These charts are well supported and can be managed, updated and displayed very quickly and easily. However the range of supported chart types is now greatly extended and includes the military CRP format, NOAA (BSB/Maptech) format and many custom formats. The S57 vector format is fully supported and this is tightly integrated with the existing chart display system and makes it simple to use raster and vector types concurrently. Our chart engine is fast and stable. It is now well proven and has been shown to be accurate and reliable. It is also very easy to use. Dual-fuel in action A variety of tools are available for passage planning and other chart operations. The system can manage an unlimited number of points, lines, boundaries, routes and other features. Points A wide range of symbols and annotations can be positioned on any chart. These can be used for many purposes from simple markers to holders of substantial information (text, pictures, etc.) such as might be used for pilotage notes. An unlimited number of range rings with associated display properties and alarm conditions can be attached to any point. Lines These can be displayed as Great Circles or Rhumb lines (or both) and can be used for such tasks as parallel indexing and clearance bearings. Magnetic variation and the ships deviation are calculated automatically so that position lines are very easy to mark up. Lines can be attached to moving objects such as ARPA targets to dynamically monitor their positions. Boundaries Areas of almost arbitrary shape and complexity can be marked out, displayed and annotated in a variety of ways. Several alarm conditions can be associated with each boundary. Routes These can be set up in a very simple and intuitive fashion. They can also be displayed in a variety of ways including printed reports. The ships progress along the route can be monitored. Arrival alarms and cross track error alarms can be set up. NMEA The navigation system can accept a wide range of data via the industry standard NMEA protocol. The interface can learn about the data available on the NMEA port and configure itself appropriately. The NMEA channel is used to read position information, such as from a GPS, heading information from the ship's gyro and ARPA information from the radar. Alarms can be associated with all the channels and the ship can be configured to use position estimation if the navigation channel drops out. Ship The ship can be displayed in a variety of ways using symbols or a vector outline. On appropriately scaled charts the ship can be drawn to scale. The ship can be positioned manually or via the NMEA interface. Notice in this picture how the ships velocity vector and heading are slightly different. Any number of ships are supported. One of these will normally be designated the own ship. A large amount of information is available relative to the own ship such as the course and distance to any point, approach and arrival alarms, corrections for the ships deviation table, and so on. Henry has a built-in model of the earth's magnetic field from which at can calculate the magnetic deviation at any point (and time) to an accuracy of about 15'. Using this manual observations can be mapped directly onto a chart. Tidal heights and rates Predications for tidal heights and rates (tidal diamonds) are calculated from UK Admiralty data. To do this the system needs to be able to calculate the relationship of the earth, the sun and the moon. This also gives us the capability to display such things as sunrise times and moon phases for anywhere on the planet. Tidal heights are displayed as graphs and tables. Tidal rates are also tabulated but can also be displayed on the chart as annotated vector arrows. Weather Charts can be overlaid with a variety of meteorological data such as wind speeds, pressure, temperature and so on. In addition sea state information such as wave height and currents can be displayed. Extreme weather phenomena such as hurricanes and typhoons can be tracked. All weather data can display historical, current and predicted states. This screen shot shows hurricane Irene which recently tracked up the East coast of the US. ChartGen A fully-extensible chart conversion and creation application for use with the "Henry" Navigation System. ChartGen converts a number of alternative raster chart formats into files that can be displayed by Henry and systems based on Henry such as those supplied by SML Technologies. The source data is typically supplied on CD. These formats are typically Military specifications and include CRP (Continuous Raster Product) and ASRP (ARC Standard Raster Product). CherSoft developed the TotalTide product for the United Kingdom Hydrographic Office. TotalTide is the world's most comprehensive Tidal Prediction Program, providing fast, accurate tidal height and tidal stream predictions for the world's commercial shipping routes. Designed exclusively for SOLAS shipping, TotalTide uses a powerful calculation algorithm together with official tidal data from the world's premier hydrographic authorities to provide instant predictions for over 7000 ports and more than 3000 tidal stream stations worldwide. TotalTide has proved popular with users and annual updates of the software have been created by CherSoft and released each January. The 2004 version is currently is development and includes improvements to ensure accurate and safe usage of the data. CherSoft have developed considerable expertise in the field of Tidal Height and Tidal Stream Prediction since beginning developing TotalTide in 2000. CherSoft developed the Digital List of Lights for the United Kingdom Hydrographic Office. The Admiralty Digital List of Lights is a digital version of the popular Admiralty List of Lights and has been specifically designed to reduce the time and effort spent on manual corrections of paper publications. A chart-based interface and comprehensive search facilities make the Admiralty Digital List of Lights easy to use, and the publication can be kept completely up to date for safety-critical information through the use of a free automated update service. CherSoft are developing the route planning and chart display systems used by AtoBviaC to produce a newer, more accurate version of the BP Shipping Marine Distance Tables. For more information visit the AtoBviaC website. CherSoft are currently developing the second-generation EasyTide Web Service for the UKHO. EasyTide is a web based service which allows users to get free tidal predictions for up to 7 days from the date of prediction. Advanced predictions starting on any date and for longer periods can be obtained by registering with the site and paying a small fee. The TotalTide engine provides all the calculations and data services to EasyTide and facilities will be offered to the user to make using the system simple, such as the ability to save a list of their favourite ports. For free online tidal predictions visit the EasyTide service: www.ukho.gov.uk/easytide Technologies CherSoft's products are built upon a set of high-performance, modular software components which enable rapid and flexible application development. The software technologies are available for purchase and to be licensed and have been used by many third-parties to create leading-edge software products. ARCS Display Kernel and Management System S57 Display Kernel and Management System HAPI (Henry API) (Raster and Vector Chart Display and Management, Advanced Navigation System Components) ARCS Display Kernel and Management System CherSoft were the first company to develop an ARCS display system when the standard was first released in 1994. The software has been continually improved and updated and is now a extremely high-powered and robust library which handles all aspects of installing, displaying and updating ARCS charts. Please contact us for more information on how you can use the ARCS Display Kernel and Management System in your systems. S57 Display Kernel and Management System CherSoft is one of the few companies in the world to have developed an S57 Kernel from the ground up. This has allowed us to created one of the fastest-performing and most fully featured S57 libraries. Contact us for more information on using the S57 Display Kernel and Management System in your systems. HAPI HAPI (the Henry API) is a comprehensive toolkit for building applications with marine charting and navigation functionality. Comprising both vector and raster chart functionality and support for all major chart formats the HAPI system allows OEMs to rapidly build a wide range of software. Examples of some of the systems built using the technologies in HAPI: Professional navigation systems Coastal and river vessel tracking Man overboard monitoring Offshore oil field monitoring and management Geographic Information Systems Mission planning and rehearsal Contact us for more information about using HAPI in your systems Raster Raster chart (ARCS Chart 2041 Port Of Southampton) Chart zoomed so that individual pixels are visible A raster image is a regular grid of coloured dots called pixels (short for Picture Elements). Most computer images are like this. A raster chart is a raster image and other information about the image, as a minimum this extra information must relate the grid of the image to its position on the world. This is essential for navigation systems as now the position of the ship (using GPS) can be overlayed onto the chart (and much more). Vector Vector chart information consists of series of geographic features. Broadly these describe Points, Lines and Areas. For example a buoy would be a point feature - this feature contains geographic position and details allowing the buoy to be drawn correctly. Some potential advantages of supplying information in this way are: Can be zoomed to arbitrary scale. Can choose which features to display - which can make a view less cluttered. Searchable - you could search through some vector data and list all the Light features in it, for example. Safety features - because features like depth contours can be understood by the display system extra safety features can be included, like an audible warning if the ship is heading into shallow waters and liable to ground. And some problems are: Vector chart displayed at different scales When zoomed to a scale more detailed than that at which the data was produced the viewer could be fooled into thinking the information was more detailed than it really is. This could be unsafe. The ECDIS standard requires a warning be displayed in this case. The computer must decide for any given view of vector information how to label the information (where to put the labels). The labelling of a raster chart will have been done by a skilled human being and at present humans do a much better job. The result of this is that typically the density of information at any scale is higher on a raster chart. At CherSoft we find that ENC vector charts are normally more readable at twice the compilation detail. Just because you can turn the display of features off does not mean they are not there. An uncluttered display is little consolation when the craft collides with something. The greatest problem with vector data for Navigation is that very little data exists. Updates Some chart formats support Updates, when a chart is updated it is not necessary to get an entire new chart only the changed portions need be sent. For raster charts this involves supply a number of small 'patches' to replace the changed portions. Vector charts are supplied as a number of 'features' and only the changed features need be supplied in an update. This can work well as localised chart details, for example the placement of a buoy, frequently change. The aim is to make the updates take up much less disk space than a complete chart or vector chart cell. The advantage of updates being small is that many can be collected on a CD and the time taken to download them is more likely to be acceptable over an expensive satellite link ARCS (Admiralty Raster Chart Service) The United Kingdom Hydrographic Office (UKHO) has been providing global electronic chart coverage of the world's shipping routes commercially since 1996. Raster format ARCS charts are digitised versions of UKHO paper charts and are as such of extremely high quality. Support updating Supplied on CDs as are updates Almost all UKHO paper charts are also supplied digitally giving almost worldwide coverage. ARCS charts cannot be made for Polar regions for technical reasons. The other paper charts for which ARCS charts are not available is for countries which do not permit the UKHO to supply digital charts under copyright law, these countries are Canada, Japan and Brazil CherSoft was one of the first companies to develop a viewer for ARCS charts for a PC NOAA/BSB/Maptech A format used for American (NOAA - National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) and Canadian produced charts. BSB Electronic Charts was a company that held the exclusive license from the U.S. Department of Commerce to develop and license electronic versions of NOAA nautical charts. Maptech now holds this license and refers to the BSB charts as the Chart Kit format. Raster format Latest version (version 3) supports updating CherSoft can support display of version 3 charts and updating support is to be added ENC (Electronic Navigation Charts) ENC is a vector format based on S57. Sometimes the two terms are used to mean the same thing. ENC is a particular use of the S57 standard, an S57 product, there are other S57 products like AMLs (Additional Military Layers). ENC is designed for (commercial) Marine Navigation. The availability of commercial data suitable for navigation is limited and improving slowly. A Navigation System only able to show ENC data would be useless. Typically navigation systems also support ARCS at least. CherSoft supports ENC charts. VPF (Vector Product Format) VPF is a standard format, structure, and organization for large geographic databases that are based on a georelational data model. VPF is primarily used for organizing and encapsulating such digital geographic databases for transmission. VPF is used as a standard way for two chart creating organisations to exchange data. CherSoft have developed VPF viewing software for demonstration. Proprietary Vector Formats Some Electronic Navigation System suppliers produced their own proprietary vector formats. A great problem with this is that the data is not (directly) supplied by one of the world's Hydrographic Offices. Many people consider this is to render the information less trustworthy and certainly the chart information will not be backed by the guarantees provided by an 'Official' data provider. Other Raster Formats There are a number of other raster formats and ways of geo-referencing raster information. Examples are CRP (Compressed Raster Product), ASRP (ARC Standard Raster Product), GEOTIFF and some proprietary formats used in GIS (Geographic Information Systems) applications. Some of these formats are supported by the CherSoft product ChartGen which converts them into the required format for display using CherSoft's navigation software (Henry). Our business is the production of bespoke, leading edge software focusing on marine electronic navigation systems. CherSoft Ltd.