In hydrography, the Navigation Surface paradigm represents an alternative to traditional approaches to manage bathymetric data by creating bathymetric databases that can be used to generate high-resolution navigation aids and other applications.^[1]

The paradigm also provides methods to manipulate the data to create products for various applications (e.g., thematic maps for marine geology, acoustic seabed classification and marine biology).^{[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.^[1]

The Open Navigation Surface (ONS) project designed a free, open-source code library to manage (read/write) the information required to create a Navigation Surface. The implementation of these requirements is represented by the Bathymetric Attributed Grid data format.^[3]

The US Navy has implemented a global navigation surface database using an infrastructure called DBDB-NV.^[2]