Decision. My boat’s depth soundings stay our own. The community depth database I was circling is paused, deliberately, and that pause is the deliverable.
Because. The research killed the idea three times over. Measured against the global public crowd-bathymetry archive, the Nordic region holds about a tenth of all files on earth — one of the best-covered regions there is, just covered where ships go and empty where yachts sail. Swedish law makes disseminating a compiled depth dataset of Swedish waters without a permit a criminal offence, punishable by up to a year — whoever hosts a Nordic database carries that personally. And the international IHO scheme already exists, built on exactly the right reference model: raw dated observations with declared offsets, reduced later.
The line that decided it: grid aggregation is not anonymisation. Aggregate one boat’s soundings into fine cells and the cells ARE the track — a movement log with extra steps.
Instead of. Founding something. The recorded route, if ever unpaused: join the existing programme, never compete with it.