A survey of official online sources of high-quality free-of-charge geospatial data for maritime geographic information systems applications
Introduction
Salt water covers about 70% of the surface of the Earth. Research and analyses pertaining to the aqueous expanse of the planet used to be carried out by coastal engineers, biologists and oceanographers, maritime transportation experts, naval architects, socio-economists and so on. The advent of new technologies and equipment —such as deep-ocean research vessels, drifter buoy arrays, side-scan sonars, satellite imagery, precise global positioning systems (GPS) etc. — has widened the scope and potential of research in the maritime context, thus making it an interdisciplinary enterprise. The methodologies used by geographers and geologists, now applied to the hydrosphere, are bringing about entirely different perspectives, while the pace of charting and mapping the liquid environment has accelerated in step with technological changes.
A maritime information system is a geographic information system (GIS) designed to capture, store, integrate, manipulate, analyze, manage, and visualize all classes of maritime geospatial data, which are capabilities serving a cross-section of disciplines. An increasingly cost-effective active maritime information systems market has also been developed, which benefits from an ongoing process of improvements in the hardware and software components of GIS. A variety of fields have gained from the application of maritime information systems, made possible by this technological boost from science, research, education, government, business and industry, to domains such as public health, homeland security, natural resources management, astronomy, meteorology, climatology, naval archaeology, shipping transportation and logistics etc.
This work defines the classes of data which constitute valuable resources towards the development, performance-tuning and efficient operation of maritime information systems and it subsequently surveys both the open and restricted data sources which provide, free-of-charge, these classes of real-world geospatial data. Data sources on the international scale are outlined, and special cases of sources significant for their propensity to provide specialized high-quality data relating to specific areas of the planet, such as specific countries or continents, will be focused upon. To the best of the authors’ knowledge this is the first comprehensive study that classifies and analyses such a wide spectrum of official online resources, compiling a thesaurus of high-precision real-word geospatial data to serve the needs of scientific research and development or educational work in the maritime information systems domain for operational, benchmarking and experimentation purposes or for pattern recognition and data mining.
Henceforward, Section 2 outlines the history of the development of maritime information systems and highlights interesting examples of systems which have been developed in the recent past in the global maritime context. Section 3 provides an overview of the steps to follow in order to access valuable real-world data to fulfill the operational demands of their maritime software applications. Section 4 records a wide range of maritime geospatial data, the availability of which in the digital form can boost the efficiency and effectiveness of maritime information systems tools from a number of perspectives. Section 5 describes the official online data sources from which these data can be retrieved, free-of-charge, at the time of writing. Section 6 discusses various restrictions that might apply when using these data. Section 7 concludes, with some comments, on this study.
Section snippets
Examples of historical & modern maritime information systems
An endeavor by oceanographers of the United States of America (U.S.) National Ocean Survey (NOS) to develop an electronic mapping scheme in the early sixties was one of the precursors of marine information systems. The computer resources that the U.S. NOS had at its disposal were prohibitively expensive and, hence, exclusive at the time, and enabled them to pioneer the production of “figure fields” and matrices of depth values for the creation of hundreds of nautical charts [1].
The seventies
Setting out the problem and applying the solution
Before discussing the various marine geospatial data classes and sources provided online, we will briefly discuss the steps that need to be taken when such data is required for the operational needs of maritime software applications. The first step –prior to the collection of data– is the identification of the classes of data required in order to make the system work efficiently and reliably. Subsequently, a variety of data sources for each kind of data are surveyed towards the selection
Maritime geospatial data classification
The wide range of nautical or marine data needed to develop and operate an efficient maritime information system (examined further below), falls under one or more of the following wide categories:
- •
up-to-date geospatial data related to human-life on or near the seas, such as ship traffic data and technical data regarding the various characteristics of ships, data related to maritime areas of particular interest to humans (e.g., harbors, fishing areas) etc.,
- •
geospatial data related to marine biome
Vessel tracking and monitoring services
MarineTraffic [38] is the most popular interactive maritime information system developed by the University of the Aegean. Its key objective is the online monitoring of ship movement worldwide, while providing the public with real-time information about port arrivals and departures. The success of the coverage provided relies on voluntary participation in the community and on local authorities installing receivers and sending the collected data in real-time to the central MarineTraffic server
Restrictions applying to the use of data
This section discusses the various types of restrictions applying to the use of data. The restrictions have been placed by the sources providing these data in order to protect the rights of the owners over the data that are made available to other parties for inspectionand downloading for the purpose of maritime applications.
Datasets acquired by ministries and governmental agencies, and other organizations, can be accessed free-of-charge for any form of use at any time, irrespective of whether
Conclusions and observations
The relatively new maritime information systems contribute to the understanding, modelling and digital exploration of about 70% of the surface of the Earth which is covered by sea water. The last decade has led to the full recognition of the crucial role played by this new age of decision-support information systems in transportation, the environment, hydrology, meteorology, oceanography, emergency, hazard and disaster management, defense and intelligence, public safety and law enforcement etc.
References (251)
- J.T. Coppock, D.W. Rhind, The History of GIS, Geographical information systems: Principles and applications 1 (1)...
- et al.
Volumetric visualization: an effective use of GIS
Technol. Field Oceanogr., Oceanogr.
(1990) GIS: the "Big Picture" in underwater search operations
Sea Technol.
(1992)- C.Keller, R.Gowan, A.Dolling, Marine Spatio-temporal GIS, in: Proceedings Canadian Conference on GIS, 1991, pp....
The UK digital marine atlas project: an evolutionary approach towards a marine information system
Int. Hydrogr. Rev.
(1991)- W.Hansen, V.Goldsmith, K.Clarke, H.Bokuniewicz, Development of a Hierarchical, Variable Scale Marine geographic...
- G. Langran, D. Kall, Processing EEZ Data in a Marine Geographic Information System, U.S. Geological Survey Circular...
- et al.
Integrating GIS with ocean models to simulate and visualize spills
Proc. ScanGIS
(1992) - I.MacDonald, S.Best, C.Lee, A.Rost, Biogeochemical processes at natural oil seeps in the Gulf of Mexico: Field-trials...
- climatechange.cs.umn.edu, Mesoscale Eddy Tracks, 〈http://climatechange.cs.umn.edu/eddies/index.html〉, (accessed...
A trajectory DB engine for mobility-centric applications
Int. J. Knowl.-Based Organ. (IJKBO)
Vessel pattern knowledge discovery from ais data: a framework for anomaly detection and route prediction
Entropy
Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques
Cited by (12)
Remote sensing applied to the study of fire in savannas: A literature review
2024, Ecological InformaticsSkyline and reverse skyline query processing in SpatialHadoop
2019, Data and Knowledge EngineeringMachine Learning and Deep Learning Techniques for Predictive Modeling of Marine Ecosystem – A case of Flic en Flac Region, Mauritius
2023, 2023 2nd International Conference on Smart Technologies for Smart Nation, SmartTechCon 2023Estimation of worldwide ship emissions using AIS signals
2020, 2020 European Navigation Conference, ENC 2020