Location Intelligence: Tracking world wide shipping movements
At Yellowfin, we clearly like data; but more so we especially like when we discover interesting data sets visualised in a simple but powerful way.
Yellowfin is also based in Melbourne Australia, a bay city with a busy shipping port. With our office on the 46th floor of the Melbourne Central tower, we enjoy excellent views that stretch across the shipping docks.
Recently, we discovered an excellent location intelligence website that links these two things.
The site provides free real-time information to the public, about ship movements and ports, mainly across the coast-lines of many countries around the world.
Since December 2004, the International Maritime Organization (IMO) requires all vessels over 299GT to carry an AIS transponder on board, which transmits their position, speed and course, among some other static information, such as vessel’s name, dimensions and voyage details.
The beauty of the marine traffic site is that they have used the AIS data and Google maps to visualise the real world, real time movements of the ships carrying these transponders. This is just a really interesting application of the Location Intelligence concepts.
So now while we are staring into space and dreaming up the next big thing in BI, we can look out our windows and using MarineTraffic.com we can link the ships we can see with the site and discover fun facts like.
* the vessels name and technical details
* pictures of the vessel
* track where it has come from or going too
* etc
Check it out !!
Yellowfin team
www.yellowfinbi.com