Coastguard seeks web services

The coastguard agency is hoping wo web-enable its system to monitor shipping movements

The Maritime and Coastguard Agency (MCA) is planning to use web services technology to improve the provision of real-time shipping information to customers.

The MCA wants to web-enable its existing Automatic Identification System (AIS), which is used for tracking and monitoring of shipping movements around the UK coast.

The AIS Service Provision project will integrate the national system to provide external customers with the ability to monitor the passage of AIS-equipped vessels in real time, and to replay through a web interface.

The MCA is seeking suppliers for the system which will allow for statistical analysis of historical AIS data.

‘Web services is a cost-efficient way of distributing data to other government stakeholders,’ said Richard Parkes, technical services director at the MCA.

‘We have had the AIS system in place for a couple of years and want to distribute information from it to external customers.’

Parkes says stakeholders are mainly government services.

‘We need a mechanism to easily distribute data. A stakeholder may want historical information, for example, vessel traffic patterns in a certain area relevant to building a wind farm,’ he said.

‘Web services have come on in leaps and bounds and we want to open up functionality to the AIS network to get best value.’

Mark Blowers, senior analyst at Butler Group, says web services technology opens up access to systems without needing to do a lot of work on the interface, by using common standards to retrieve data.

‘Web services has developed a lot in the past two years and most people, if not already trying out the technology, are planning to do so.

‘Standards have come along and exposing information without having to incur the expense of manual coding makes sense to organisations that want to open up access to systems to trusted partners,’ he said.

The MCA works to prevent the loss of lives at sea and is responsible for implementing maritime safety policy.