REPORTING
Now that you have completed your field activity, it is time to report your findings.
Since April 1, 2003, CCWEB became the sole means of submitting Cooperative Charting reports. On that date, paper-based reporting ended and the old, formidable 77-4 form was permanently retired from use. It has drastically reduced the time and effort the Marine Chart Division expends in processing Cooperative Charting reports. Furthermore, following initial screening, the data submitted quickly becomes available to it's cartographers via the Division's internal databases. See the General Reporting Guidelines. For additional assistance, check Chapter 4 - Cooperative Charting Website "CCWeb" Guide (1.81 MB) of the new Cooperative Charting Manual.
CCWeb: (To access, click the this
link)
CCWEB
Logging on to CCWEB requires the entry of a USPS CERTIFICATE NUMBER and a
PASSWORD that is available from your Squadron or District Cooperative Charting
Chairman. Without the password, you will not be able to logon.
CCWEB is an Internet website provided by the Marine Chart Division
of the National Ocean Service, NOAA, for use by USPS Cooperative Charting
participants in submitting their Cooperative Charting reports to NOAA. It was
proposed and conceptually developed by USPS National Cooperative Charting Past
Rear Commander Stuart S. Rideout and programmed, equipped, and debugged by the
Marine Chart Division. Committee Area Representative for District 27 Edwin
Summers assisted the Marine Chart Division in extensively beta testing the
software for a year with the help of D/27 participants.
HISTORYPrior to the inception of CCWEB, the data needs of the Marine Chart Division were described verbally and textually. USPS participants often didn't interpret this information in the way intended with the result that each year quite a few reports were useless to the Chart Division. Although the originators of the useless reports received credits for their time and effort, unfortunately, the Chart Division did not receive any useful data.
Conveying the data needs of the Nautical Chart Division to participants was a major part of the USPS Cooperative Charting training program. Extensive effort went into it at the national, district, and squadron levels. CCWEB changed all of this. When the Chart Division was programming CCWEB, they found it necessary to review all reports. In doing so, they also found that the digital approach necessitated more data definitions and they provided them. As a result, USPS no longer needs to be concerned about conveying data needs to participants -- CCWEB does exactly that. The Chart Division programmed CCWEB, so in effect they are now telling each participant directly about their data needs. Because CCWEB brings an explicit definition of the data needed in each type of report, the number of unusable reports has dropped drastically since CCWEB has been in use.
