We’re developing a custom csv download that contains only vessels and organizations that carry an IMO number. The purpose is to make it easier for our clients in the shipping industry to plug a list of sanctioned vessels into their screening workflows. Any questions and any feedback on this prototype would be much appreciated! Does the structure of the file work? Is any of the data fields superfluous or is anything missing? Maritime-related sanctions - OpenSanctions
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I am just barely learning about practices for collecting and using maritime data.
Does it help to compare what’s needed in some other maritime datasets?
These are two amazing resources, thanks so much for pointing them out here! I particularly adore what the Fishing Watch folks have built - it’s an absolutely unreal level of detail (“someone was fishing in this are in the Red Sea 71 minutes ago”)…
Maritime data, unfortunately, seems to be a slightly cursed business: the International Maritime Organization has a mandate to maintain a global database of all ships and shipping companies - but they decided to out-source that job to Lloyds, and later to IHS, which is now part of S&P Global.
That means that the very act of minting an IMO number has been privatized, and by definition there cannot ever be an open (as in openly licensed) database of ships in the future. Possibly the closest thing to a government-run, and public access authoritative source of shipping info is the EU’s EQUASIS system, but that has no API and the Terms of Service aren’t nice to data hunter-gatherers like us…
Anyway, just a little rant that tries to answer the question “Why can OpenSanctions not do great data enrichment on maritime sanctions listings?”
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The privatization of IMOs is so awful!
Paul Woods @ Global Fishing Watch also recently posted about Egil Möller @ Kahu Earth for monitoring ships, ocean environment, etc.
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It would be possible to make a connection between vessels on Open Sanctions and vesselfinder e.g. BAKHTEMIR, Salvage Ship - Details and current position - IMO 9797577 - VesselFinder Bakhtemir - OpenSanctions (the IMOs match)