A generalized surface is a shoal-biased surface that can be used for creating more cartographically correct contours for navigation aids (for example, Electronic Navigational Charts).
These surfaces are created from a finalized surface (see Finalize. The finalized surface is down-sampled so that some of the finer surface details are no longer visible, while the shoals are preserved. This surface can be used to directly generate contours and selected soundings.