Heterogeneous Integrated Dataset for Maritime Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance
Facing an increasing amount of movements at sea and daily impacts on ships, crew and our global ecosystem, many research centers, international organizations, industrials have favored and developed sensors, detection techniques for the monitoring, analysis and visualization of sea movements. Automatic Identification System (AIS) is one of these electronic systems that enable ships to broadcast their dynamic (position, speed, destination…) and static (name, type, international identifier…) information via radio communications.
Having spatially and temporally aligned maritime dataset relying not only on ships’ positions but also on a variety of complementary data sources is of great interest for the understanding of maritime activities and their impact on the environment.
This dataset contains ships’ information collected though the Automatic Identification System, integrated with a set of complementary data having spatial and temporal dimensions aligned. The dataset contains four categories of data: Navigation data, vessel-oriented data, geographic data, and environmental data. It covers a time span of six months, from October 1st, 2015 to March 31st, 2016 and provides ships positions within Celtic sea, the Channel and Bay of Biscay (France). The dataset is proposed with predefined integration and querying principles for relational databases. These rely on the widespread and free relational database management system PostgreSQL, with the adjunction of the PostGIS extension, for the treatment of all spatial features proposed in the dataset.
Integration of Nautical Charts in Maritime Dataset
For an efficient and advanced spatio-temporal analysis, reported information of vessels locations and behaviours must be cross checked with others and cartographical data. Amongst cartographical information, the International Hydrographic Organisation (IHO) defined a vector interchange format used for maritime charts. From this format (S-57 or its revision S-100) ensues the ENC (Electronic Nautical Chart) product specification use in electronic chart display and traffic control visualisation. It provides a data structure and format that are used to implement a data model and characterises spatial entities and geometrical primitives. The dataset labelled 10.5281/zenodo.1167595 contains ships’ information collected though the Automatic Identification System (AIS), prepared together with a set of related data having spatial and temporal dimensions aligned. This technical note provides additional information for the integration of S57 nautical charts in this dataset.
Composite Maritime Events
The dataset includes approximately 4M composite maritime events (e.g., anchored vessels, loitering, ship-to-ship transfer, etc.), recognised by RTEC (https://github.com/aartikis/RTEC) on AIS position signals, over a period of six months, from approx. 5K vessels sailing around the port of Brest, France.
The dataset of position signals is available here: https://zenodo.org/record/1167595
Information on the specification of the composite maritime events is available here: http://cer.iit.demokritos.gr/papers/pitsikalis.pdf