The Office of Naval Research Global Americas (ONRG Americas) and the U.S. Southern Command, in conjunction with the Director General of the Chilean Maritime Territory and Merchant Marine, and the Director of the U.S. Office of Global Maritime Situational Awareness are co-sponsoring the "Global Maritime Domain Awareness (GMDA) Conference". This conference will occur within the framework of the 6th International Maritime and Naval Exhibition and Conference for Latin America, EXPONAVAL 2008. This combined event is a follow-up to the 1st Western Hemisphere Maritime Domain Awareness Workshop held in Santiago, Chile in December 2007, which facilitated a regional dialogue among key Western Hemisphere nations to improve information sharing in the maritime domain.

The primary purpose of this conference will be to continue the dialogue from the previous workshop and develop a working roadmap to coalesce the global MDA community towards a comprehensive maritime security framework. The first portion of the conference will be devoted to shaping a “world view” of MDA by bringing in speakers from Europe, Asia, Africa, the Middle East and the Americas with the intent of discussing common practices that could be leveraged to achieve interoperability amongst partner nations’ MDA systems. The second part of the conference will be devoted to the 2nd Western Hemisphere Maritime Domain Awareness (MDA) Workshop and will focus on determining the progress made on those recommended actions that resulted from the 1st Western Hemisphere MDA Workshop.