The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) delivers world-class geospatial intelligence that provides a decisive advantage to policymakers, military, intelligence professionals and first responders. NGA has invested in a wide range of geospatial solutions from the CARIS Ping-to-Chart product line to aid in hydrographic data processing, storage and chart production.

CARIS has worked closely with NGA for several years and the solutions are used by NGA’s Maritime Safety Office to support their safety of navigation mission. NGA processes sounding data with HIPS and SIPS to generate International Hydrographic Organization (IHO) compliant electronic charts using S-57 Composer.

NGA recently purchased over 30 licenses of CARIS software products to increase the agency's capacity to produce Digital Nautical Charts (DNCs). The DNC is a vector-based digital database containing maritime significant features essential for safe marine navigation and NGA maintains a portfolio of approximately 5,000 nautical charts.

A spokesman for NGA said, "CARIS S-57 Composer is currently being used in NGA's in-house production branch empowering analysts to make edits big and small, including extending previous chart boundaries and complete re-compilations. S-57 Composer has made it easy to ingest bathymetric data, ENCs, and raster products to both update individual DNCs and conflate smaller and larger scale products to ensure they accurately depict the maritime environment.  NGA's new workflows within the In-House production branches are shaping the way we will work in the future to quickly and accurately maintain our safety of navigation products."