Elsevier

Information Systems

Volume 65, April 2017, Pages 36-51
Information Systems

A survey of official online sources of high-quality free-of-charge geospatial data for maritime geographic information systems applications

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.is.2016.11.002Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Definition of the classes of data for the development of maritime information systems.

  • A wide spectrum of sources for real-world high-precision maritime data worldwide.

  • A thesaurus of geospatial maritime data for the needs of research, development and education.

Abstract

Maritime information systems are innovative geographic information systems for study, monitoring and action-taking in maritime areas. They respond to needs in the development of intelligent systems for applications such as scientific research and safety (monitoring the global ecosystem, the atmosphere, the oceans, the biosphere, ice fields, fish populations etc.) or the support of the maritime industry and its related organizations (tracking the position of vessels in motion, providing them with safe routing etc.). For these systems to efficiently handle the complex demands made on such specialized applications, up-to-date real-world data purchased or downloaded from official, trustworthy online data sources is needed. This article examines geospatial free-of-charge data sources and discusses the various classes of available data. Several hundred resources and their available datasets were empirically tested and their quality and usefulness verified, producing a selective thesaurus. An accompanying website summarizing useful available information about the data sources and datasets also includes information which could not be mentioned in the article. The survey, covering a wide spectrum of online information regarding up-to-date sources for genuine valuable real-world high-precision maritime data worldwide, is, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, the only one of its kind at the time of writing.

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.

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