[citation needed] Recent technological developments in hydrography (e.g., large adoption of multibeam echosounder and electronic navigational charts) have pushed hydrographic organizations to adopt a new production paradigm centered on gridded surfaces rather than sounding-based workflow and products.
[2] Based on such a shift, the concept of navigation surface was introduced in 2003 to provide a seafloor model at the best resolution that the data support.
Depth values for nautical charting are then derived by generalization of the available gridded surfaces.
In addition, a quality assessment for each grid node of the navigation surface is created through an uncertainty layer.
[3] The US Navy has implemented a global navigation surface database using an infrastructure called DBDB-NV.