Towards Global Maritime Awareness - A Technical Perspective

In the era of ever-decreasing military budgets and therefore assets, improving the situational awareness of maritime domain has become a major concern. In order to find appropriate solutions, the maritime domain has to be studied having due regard to its particular difficulties and challenges. Commercial automatic identification systems (AIS), supporting multi-national programs, have the potential to become an extremely useful source of information for a composite global maritime picture. With the increasing amount of data and information provided by such commercial systems, a layered approach for maritime picture compilation is proposed, at both unclassified and classified levels of maritime data. Huge amount of data in the unclassified level dictates utilization of modern software and data mining technologies to produce meaningful and useful information for the systems with higher classifications. Hence, integrating different information sources to these levels, and establishing and maintaining the "recognized maritime picture" for total maritime domain awareness is still difficult requiring a number of research topics to be addressed