We are in Berlin at the incredible Next Berlin conference, hosting the workshop Internet of Ships. This is a heads up for anyone who is in the city who’d like to hang out and talk ship.
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According to the International Maritime Organization, about 90% of all world trade is carried by sea. Inspired by the seas of data shipping generates, Shippr iwill become a general-purpose maritime datastore. We intend to fully open up the store for anyone to use, and to build applications on top through the Shippr app which will follow soon after. We will also develop a ‘Foursquare for ships’. And AIS transponders will allow to check-in ships automatically into locations like ports, locks, repair-docks, oil platforms and off-shore anchor places, and into events e.g. like bunkering, storm, sale, collision and piracy. By looking at ships as individuals with their own timelines and using the logic of checking into locations and events, we hope to build a meaningful interface for exploring the hidden world of the seas.
Our workshop is directly related to Shippr. Our key findings and / or questions are:
* Can maritime data be used as monitor to expose economic mechanisms?
* What models can be used to recognise patterns, make predictions and find anomalies?
* How can social media be used to connect ships, (port) authorities and the public at large?
Our maritime datastore is currently holding location data and specifications (size, type, etc…) of ships in the Port of Rotterdam. The aim of the workshop is to find methods to transform this set into information and or to relate it to external resources. Ideally we could establish a(n) (concept of an) application within this short period of time. During the workshop participants will get access to our database trough an API.
At the beginning of march students of studio (Re)charge Information had a 2-day workshop with Dutch data specialists Juha van’t Zelfde (cofounder of the VURB foundation) and Maurits De Bruijn. Students were building connections between databases and twitter messages to visualize the spatial opportunities of big data and civic media. Juha and Maurits also presented their Shippr project – a maritime datastore. One of the students, journalist Maria Romakina has talked to Juha and Maurits about the project and how ships will communicate through social networks in the nearest future.
(via Blog - Strelka Institute for media, architecture and design)
Shippr at Hack de Overheid Open Haven Data workshop
Op de Hackathon wordt tevens een workshop georganiseerd rondom de Rotterdamse Haven. Welke informatie over de Haven kan er ontsloten worden en hoe kan de stad Rotterdam en de Haven meer met elkaar worden verbonden? Verschillende apps en websites laten op een speelse wijze zien hoe er interessante dingen kunnen worden gedaan met de data van de Rotterdamse haven.
Programma:
- Presentatie van Shippr: een nieuw concept rond haven data
- Presentate Superebb door Jan-Geert Munneke
- moderatie door Albert Veenstra van TNO
I got to Helsinki on the Tuesday, and caught the tail end of the Data Journalism session that day including an excellent, inspirational talk on shippr.org amongst other things. It detailed the amazing knowledge and insight gained from tracking the movement of ships with open data. I couldn’t help thinking that academics could learn a lot from these open data visualization experts (myself included!).
The Open Knowledge Festival 2012, Helsinki: some notes - Ross Mounce
Thank you Ross for your kind words.
Presenting Shippr, a maritime datastore
Yesterday the final presentations of Curating Reality - New tools for investigative journalism, this year’s Sandberg at Mediafonds masterclass for designers and media professionals, took place at the promethean Eye Film Institute in Amsterdam. This is where we presented our proposal for developing Shippr, a maritime datastore. Here is a brief write up of our presentation.
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According to the International Maritime Organization, the United Nations specialized agency with responsibility for the safety and security of shipping and the prevention of marine pollution by ships, ”international shipping is the principal carrier of world trade, transporting around 90% of global commerce.”
Despite their ubiquitous influence, the manifold aspects of marine traffic modestly appear in the news. We read about ships when they are pirated, capsize or spill. But what happens on sea in between these events? What can we learn from the oceans of data that are produced by tens of thousands of ships and marine infrastructure roaming the seas?
With Shippr, we would like to build an public datastore for maritime data, pooling multiple sources and databases into one open directory. This data can range from location of ships via their AIS transponders, cargo, ship owners, and destinations, to weather events, environmental statistics, port CO2 reduction, and even acts of piracy and terrorism.
Anything that happens on sea does not have to stay on sea: it can help economic researchers understand emerging patterns of behaviour, it can benefit environmental research, but it can also make the forgotten space more visible for a larger audience of curious spotters, collectors and even gamers.
Ships turn off their AIS signal in the Gulf of Oman
Wouldn’t it be awesome to have a Fantasy Football for ships? A Facebook embedded synthesis of Championship Manager and Ports of Call, using realworld data like weekly trading results from the Shippr datastore, challenging your online friends? Ship Manager would be a great game to source information from marine enthusiasts, students and the general audience. And to distribute public awareness of maritime affairs.
One Shippr application could be a Foursquare for ships
Another application could be a Foursquare for ships. Instead of people checking in, it would be ships, telling harbour masters, bunker suppliers and ship spotters when they enter a port. Or when they survived 10 hurricanes (“Storming through! You just unlocked the Hurrican Badge!”). Or become the Mayor of the Port of Shanghai. This could be an app with endless specs: we would love to ‘love’ a ship we see pass by, and follow it on its route towards the Strate of Hormuz. Or search for the world’s most environmentally effective fleet.
We intend to develop the Shippr datastore in the near future. We hope Shippr will have significance for domains outside of journalism, like academic research, information design and, of course, professional shipping companies.
We look forward to meeting people interested in collaborating on the project. If you are, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with us.
Shippr - exploring the seas of maritime data
Juha van ‘t Zelfde & Maurits de Bruijn
Part of ‘Curating Reality’, a cooperation of the Dutch Media Fund and the Sandberg Institute.
“Once you are interested in how things evolve, you have a kind of never-ending perspective. You’d have the power of potential redefinition.”
- Rem Koolhaas
Background
Maritime transportation networks play a crucial role in the mobility and exchange of goods. With 90% of world trade carried by sea (IMO), the global network of merchant ships provides one of the most important modes of transportation. According to the 2011 CIA World Factbook, the world total number of merchant ships of 1,000 Gross Register Tons or over was 38,988.
Although embodying almost the entire global economy, the maritime world is hardly covered in daily reporting. Public news concentrates on accidents and media friendly topics like piracy, smuggling or port security. Sector news expands this with internal affairs like economizing (fleet routing and scheduling), ownership, freight rates and some ecology (eventually economizing as well). The most unexpected content comes directly from staff and companies being massively present and active within social media, a neglected source.
Topics like the vulnerable dependency on non-renewable sources or the tremendous impact in social-economical and ecological issues, facilitated by the sector, are hardly addressed. Shippr aims to create at least awareness around its existence, not even the topics mentioned above, by revealing and opening up the ‘forgotten space’.
Plan
Our methods vary, but mostly consist of harvesting, combining and relating existing (trusted) data flows (Marine-traffic, Grosstonnage, My-ship, E-ship, IHS and IMO), sector news channels (Lloyds list, Shipping news daily, IHS etc..), and, of course, conventional public news channels. Also maritime ecological resources, weather reports and social network activity of crewmembers, shipowners and companies will be monitored and connected to our ships database. The core is built around ships and their (actual) location data provided by Marine-traffic.com that in its turn collects input from AIS transponders present on almost any commercial vessel at sea.
This content will be shared through an API (‘shippr data store’) with a variety of partners like press agencies, universities and local authorities. Next to providing ‘extrapolated data’ as ‘intermediate good’ we want to provide curated content by inviting several partners to create transformations or interpretations based on our collection. Those can vary from (dynamic) data visualisations or (virtual) photo exhibitions to fact checking applications and in depth data analysis.
Ship Rec: the Shippr Data Model
Inspired by Kevin Ashton’s ‘Internet of Things’ a maritime equivalent of foursquare is set up. Initially this will stay as close as possible to the original concept. Only that users are replaced by ships, locations by hubs and harbours, and events by collisions (with other ships, hurricanes or pirates). Accordingly a set of obtainable badges will be created that thereby determine the characteristics of the output.
Within this scenario there is no user-interaction at all (except for gazing at what happens). On the longer term the user is granted interference, by, for instance, connecting ships or locations to location data in their foursquare account. Within this environment the relation between single users and ships can be deepened through direct contact with ships crew or harbour staff via social media. Also competition can be used as an incentive to actually create content by taking part in crowd computed scenarios in order to solve specific (journalistic) maritime questions.
