The Inland ENC Harmonization Group (IEHG) was formed in 2003 by North America and Europe to facilitate the development of international standards for Inland ENC data. Russia has joined the IEHG soon after that and Brazil in 2007, China in 2009, South Korea in 2010, Venezuela and Peru in 2011. The IEHG is comprised of representatives from government, industry and academia. European participants take part on behalf of the Temporary Working Group Inland ECDIS of the European Committee for drawing up standards in the field of inland navigation (CESNI), the former European Inland ECDIS Expert Group. The North American participants are members of the North American Inland ENC Ad Hoc working group that was formed in 2002. The IEHG meets normally once per year. However, most of the work is accomplished via e-mail correspondence.
The goal of the IEHG is to agree upon specifications for Inland ENCs that are suitable for all known inland ENC data requirements for safe and efficient navigation for European, North and South American, Asian and Russian Federation inland waterways. However, it is intended that this standard meet the basic needs for Inland ENC applications, worldwide. As such, the Inland ENC standard is flexible enough to accommodate additional inland waterway requirements in other regions of the world. IEHG is recognized as a Non-Governmental International Organization (NGIO) by the International Hydrographic Organization (IHO).
This GitHub is used for the development of the new S-401 ENC standard and contains several repositories dedicated to topics like 'Product Specification', 'Feature Catalogue', 'DCEG',...
The IEHG is also using the GitHub as discussion place for questions and ideas, but also to submit the official Change Requests and get them approved. Each new discussion has to be assigned to one of two topics: general discussions on Inland ENCs and formal Change Requests. As a member, you can subscribe to all (new) discussions so you'll be notified by mail whenever a new discussion or comment was posted.