Industry partners came together to support a capacity building workshop in Haiti, September 5th to 16th. The workshop is the first step to building hydrographic surveying and charting capacity in Haiti, which will improve safety of navigation, and expand marine commerce.

The workshop was sponsored and funded by the Pan American Institute of Geography and History, the International Hydrographic Organization and the Republic of Korea. In addition, France’s hydrographic office, Service Hydrographique et Oceanographique de la Marine provided a hydrographer and a nautical cartographer to lead the two weeks of training. Industry partners CARIS, Kongsberg Maritime, Hemisphere GPS and Hypack provided software, hardware and engineering support.

The unique expertise that these organizations provided led to the project meeting its objectives for building hydrographic and nautical charting capacity. The workshop enabled the Service Maritime et de Navigation d'Haiti (SEMANAH) to conduct surveys and process the single beam sonar data that they collected. CARIS S-57 Composer software was used to convert a Digital Nautical Chart (DNC) to an Electronic Navigational Chart (ENC). The survey work will provide SEMANAH with the data to update the ENC and a corresponding paper chart in the future.

Along with S-57 Composer for chart production, CARIS provided computer hardware and their HIPS and SIPS software suite for processing the single beam data.