Registration is NOW OPEN.

General registration must use the General Conference Registration Form. If you would like to register/pay for an accompanying person separately, please register them using the Accompanying Persons Registration Form here. Otherwise you will be able to register/pay for them on the General Conference Registration Form.

Please note: you will be leaving the Shallow Survey 2008 site for registrations

Conference registration fee includes admission to all technical sessions, exhibit areas, evening receptions and Wednesday night lobster bake.

Exhibitor Registration is now CLOSED.

Preliminary One-Day Seminar Notice: Interferometric sonars for shallow water seabed mapping - data processing challenges and solutions.

A co-hosted GeoAcoustics/Fledermaus seminar will be held on Monday 20th October from 10:00am - 4:00pm in Portsmouth NH, the day before Shallow Survey 2008. The seminar will be held at the same venue as the Conference - Wentworth by the Sea Hotel in New Castle, New Hampshire.

A series of presentations are planned from system experts and users followed by a facilitated debate on the future of interferometric sonar data processing -

• What is current best practice?
• How can process paths be improved?
• What is the best way to account for errors?

We hope to address these questions and more, aimed at the developing use of interferometric sonars in shallow water mapping for navigational charting and habitat mapping. There will be opportunities for every delegate to address their priorities, air their experiences, and influence the technology development.

The seminar is free to attend, with lunch provided. Attendance is by pre-booking only - if you are interested in booking a place please contact either of the seminar hosts: Lindsay Gee ( This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it ) of IVS3D or Tom Hiller ( This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it ) of GeoAcoustics UK (now a Kongsberg Maritime Company).

1:30 pm to 3:30 pm Friday 24 October 2008

Shallow Survey Conference 2008 provides an opportunity for conference delegates from a variety of international Hydrographic Offices and the hydrographic industry to meet and discuss common challenges in the flow of hydrographic data from Survey to Nautical Chart. Mariners require charting data, in traditional paper nautical charts and in raster and electronic nautical charts, in a timely manner and with full quality assurance. Hydrographic Offices must acknowledge the additional requirement for cost efficiency. These three demands can be contradictory and require well-thought out data processing, management and production processes. This workshop, which will be moderated by the UNH Center for Coastal and Ocean Mapping—NOAA/UNH Joint Hydrographic Center will open what we intend to be a continuing international forum for exchange of information on this critical survey to chart data pipeline.

Among the topics for discussion:

• Timetable from completed survey to distributed chart
• Setting charting priorities
• Quality Control and Quality Assurance processes in the survey to chart pipeline Generalization of high resolution data sets
• Management approaches to improved efficiency
• Commercial-off-the-shelf and in-house quality assurance and production tools
• Reacting to changes in survey and charting technology
• Personnel competencies and resources for the post-survey processing and production

1:30 pm to 3:30 pm Friday 24 October 2008

GSF (Generic Sensor Format) has become a standard file format for bathymetry data and is widely used in the hydrographic community. This single file format is one of the US Department of Defense Bathymetric Library (DoDBL) processing formats and is currently version-controlled jointly by SAIC and the US Navy. The GSF format, and code to read it, is open source and is regularly updated to keep current with new technologies and uses. The purpose of this GSF workshop is to continue interaction with the community to ensure the format remains responsive and to educate potential new users on the advantages of this method of data formatting.

Topics covered during the seminar will include:

• A brief history on the format, when, where and why it was developed
• Common uses of the format and future directions
• An overview of the format structure
• How updates to the format are made and how information about the format is disseminated
• Demonstrations on using GSF
• Questions and answers from the user community

This seminar may be of particular interest to you if: you collect data or process data with software that supports GSF, you have customers that deliver data to you in GSF, or you are interested in adding support for GSF within your software.

Shallow Survey 2008, The Fifth International Conference on High-Resolution Surveys in Shallow Water will be hosted by the University of New Hampshire's Center for Coastal and Ocean Mapping and the UNH Joint Hydrographic Center (CCOM/JHC) in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, October 2008.

Following the tradition established for this series of conferences, a "common data set" will be collected in the waters around Portsmouth and made available well before the conference. The number of participants will be limited to ensure that the meeting will maintain its focus and provide a lively venue for the interchange of new ideas about the challenges facing those charged with all aspects of shallow water surveying.

This meeting will be designed to address many of the issues faced when conducting shallow water surveys. See the call for papers section for more information on themes and paper submission guidelines.