Performance Work Statement draft

Coast Pilot Production System—Maintenance and Support

U.S. Department of Commerce

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National Ocean Service/Office of Coast Survey
Coast Pilot Production System—Maintenance and Support

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Performance Work Statement

01 September 2026

1.0 Performance Work Statement

Coast Pilot Production System—Maintenance and Support

1.1 Background

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The United States Coast Pilot® is a series of ten nautical publications that cover a variety of information important to mariners and others interested in the coastal and intra-coastal waterways (ICW), as well as inland routes including the Great Lakes. The Coast Pilot is a companion document to the nautical chart and it is a required carriage for regulated vessels. Under 33 CFR § 164.33 (Navigation Safety Regulations), the U.S. Coast Pilot publications are explicitly required to be on board and corrected to the latest updates for the area to be transited. The Coast Pilot contains supplemental information that may be difficult to portray on a nautical chart, including channel descriptions, anchorages, pilotage, Federal regulations applicable to navigation and other significant information relating to navigation. The Coast Pilot is available to the public in a number of formats including Print-on-Demand (POD) books and a variety of up-to-date digital files (PDF, HTML, XML) that are available for free download on the web (https://nauticalcharts.noaa.gov/publications/coast-pilot/index.html). Traditionally, for users to maintain an updated copy of the Coast Pilot, it was necessary to obtain periodically announced corrections to the book via the Notice to Mariners or the NOAA website. Corrections were cut from a paper copy and taped into the book or the changes were made through hand-written corrections.

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NOAA’s Office of Coast Survey (OCS) is continuing an effort aimed at modernizing the Coast Pilot including on-line weekly updating of files, expanding sources of content, improving the quality of content, data sharing with other trusted sources and adding more display modalities and output formats. In order to realize these results, OCS has developed a custom production system with improved functionality over any other commercially available product by linking to associated services, and allowing for third party interactions to freely develop value-added products. The Coast Pilot Production System (CPPS) needs to maintain data management capability in order to share its information with other sources and offer a customizable product that is useful across several platforms. For example, an application developer