Surveys in. Charts out. One system, from data acquisition to the published chart.
An open chart production system, built around five managers — one for each part of the journey. Beneath them lie the open foundations the geospatial world already trusts: PostgreSQL and PostGIS to hold the data, QGIS to work in, GEOS and PROJ to keep the geometry and the projections true.
The managers
chartManager
Decide which charts exist, and issue them.
- chartManagement
Shows the active chart sets and how each one stands. Tells you
at a glance whether a chart is still current, or is due a new edition
or an update.
One view tells you the status of your chart sets. - chartComposition Where a chart set is put together: what kind of chart it is, which waters it covers, at which scales, and the settings every chart in the set inherits.
- referenceData The shared information every chart relies on — buoyage systems, water level references, the areas the office is responsible for, and how much detail is shown as you zoom.
bathyManager
Turn survey measurements into a depth model.
- bathyProcess
Where a new survey arrives — and where nothing about it is
thrown away. Each sounding keeps how certain it is and the track the
vessel sailed to find it, so the depth that reaches the chart can
always account for itself.
Advanced processing included. Vital information travels with every dataset. - bathyCatalog The register of every survey held: who measured it, when, which area it covers and how accurate it is.
- bathyCombine Brings many surveys together into one continuous surface, so a chart can be made across the seams between them. Where surveys overlap, a ranking the office sets decides which one is used; where it cannot tell two apart, the newer survey wins. Every combine keeps a record of the surveys it was made from, so the chart can say where its depths came from.
- bathyRecipes Every surveyor delivers in their own way. The office describes its deliveries once — which field of the metadata means what, which column holds the position, the depth, the time and the survey line — and from then on each new delivery is recognised as it arrives.
geoManager
Author everything that is not depth.
- productionData
The live picture of the world — coastline, structures, marks and
regulated areas — as charts are currently made from it.
Management of geodata on multiple levels, with supportive tooling. - stagedData A place to draw and check changes before they count. Nothing here reaches a chart until somebody accepts it.
- plannedObjects Works that have been announced but are not yet on the water, so the office can prepare before the change arrives.
- importENC
Reads an existing chart into the system and keeps everything it
contains, so earlier work carries forward.
Don't worry about importing your current data — Peau du Monde comes with advanced ENC processing tooling. - relatedData
Records that things belong together — a bridge and its spans, a
structure and the lights on it — so they stay connected wherever they
appear.
Aggregation, associations and relations made easy. Draw an area in the chart around your objects, select, and done.
botManager
Let the machine prepare, and the person decide.
- Bots The automated helpers: what each one does, and where it runs.
- Jobs The work that runs to a schedule, and which stretch of water each job looks after.
- Results What the overnight work produced, ready to be read and either accepted or set aside.
- Nightly validation A nightly check that every source still looks the way the system expects, so a surprise is found early rather than in a chart.
uploadManager
Deliver finished charts to the people who need them.
- Publication Completed chart sets on their way out to the mariners, systems and services that use them.
productLines
Peau du Monde is a family. Each line does one part of the work, and each runs inside QGIS.
- Peau du Monde | chartProduction The production system on this page: surveys and source data in, charts out.
- Peau du Monde | dataBridge Opens charts — S-57 and Inland ENC, S-101, S-102 and S-111 — and audits ENCs against the IHO's own checks.
- Peau du Monde | postProcessor For the office that already makes charts: finds where a finished set does not fit together, and proposes the smallest repair before it is issued. More about the postProcessor
Beside the managers
- Office Who works here, what each person is allowed to do, and how a new colleague is set up.
- Audit A complete record of what was done and by whom, kept safely apart from the data it describes.
- dashBot A live view of what the system is doing right now, and what it has done today.
designFeatures
Features we believe every user, every office and every chart deserves.
- A visual model builder, to map source data onto chart objects without
writing code.
Handling source data: sources on the left, object layers on the right, and your custom mapping in between. - Industry-standard charting tools alongside more advanced ones — edge blending of surveys, dynamic grids for the wet Skin of the Earth, and minimumScale profiles.
- Automated detection of changes in the waterway from aerial photography.
- Easy enrollment of new colleagues.
- Security that is part of the design, not added afterwards.
- An intuitive, uncluttered way of working.
- Day, dusk and night colours, for people who look at a screen all day.
- Mistakes caught at the keyboard, not discovered after publication.
- Automation that prepares the work; people who decide it.
- Everything that was done, on the record and readable.
- Your data on your own server, under your own roof.
- Open standards throughout, and software anyone may read.
Intuitive....
Design your cells, draw your no-coverage zones, draw (or import) your coastline and shoreline constructions, point out to Peau du Monde which side of the coastline is land. That's it — you are ready to go.
scope
What is committed to the build, and coming.
- archiveManager A standalone server that keeps your historic data safe, with the option to move what has come to rest into cold storage — kinder to the budget and to the planet.
- paperCharts The devil we know, and trust.
- waterManager Water levels as the S-104 product, with surface currents (S-111) to follow — the first of L'eau du Monde's products, begun in the autumn of 2026.
the presentCovered and futureReady
The standards Peau du Monde speaks.
- S-57 ENC v3.1
- InlandENC v2.5
- Bathymetric (Inland) ENC
- S-101 ENC v2.0.0
- S-102 v3.0.0
- S-104 v2.0.0 — in the making
- S-111 v2.0.0 — read today, made later
Peau du Monde is registered with the IHO as a data producer, for S-57 and for S-100 products.
timeline
- Autumn 2026 Work on S-104 water levels begins — the first step towards Peau du Monde's twin sister, L'eau du Monde.
- End of 2026 Chart sets.
- Summer 2027 L'eau du Monde takes shape: a toolset for hydrological data and the products that come from it — S-104 and S-111 among them.
- End of 2027 The project completes, and is published on GitLab: open source, and free.
What it is for
Hydrographic charting is a long and careful tradition. The standards behind it carry decades of accumulated experience at sea, and the offices that maintain them have made navigation safer than it has ever been.
Peau du Monde is built to work inside that tradition — the same standards, the same products, the same exchange formats — so that it sits alongside whatever an office already runs, reads what it already holds, and adds another way to publish.
Its aim is reach. A great deal of excellent survey data is held by waterway authorities, ports and regional services, and a complete production line should be within the means of any of them.