ABSTRACTThe emergence of data bases for the management of hydrographic data raises some questions about how to characterize the quality of data placed in the data base. This is important, since subsequent automatic handling of the data will be less dependent on the human “feel” for data quality that has been the case in the past.In this paper we review approaches that can be taken to obtain data quality parameters for navigational data. In particular, those based on various statistical assumptions are described and compared. Proposals for various options are presen