UKHO - Simon Hampshire - Situational Awareness - Any Time, Any Place, Anywhere

Editor's Notes

1. Good morning and welcome My name is Simon Hampshire And I work at the UK’s Hydrographic Office
2. I plan to give you a little background to the UKHO and our concept capability demonstrator FMGC We’ll then lightly cover a part of the architecture built and then go into a little more depth for the components, followed by a couple of use cases Before closing with a look to the future.
3. The combination of internet, “cloud”, open standards and web services has encouraged an expectation that all information should be available, in the format desired, and as up-to-date as possible. Establishing a GIS platform that delivers situational awareness across a variety of infrastructures and to a multitude of clients is key to delivering against these expectations.   The UK Hydrographic Office (UKHO) and Esri UK have engaged in a project to develop a proof of concept that delivers new-found capability for the shore-based, afloat and deployed user. This project named “Future Maritime Geospatial Concepts (FMGC)” involves the sourcing, management, and analysis of various datasets and the subsequent dissemination of information to a variety of clients. The number of datasets used within the project is large and wide-ranging, varying from commercially sourced near-real-time ship locations from an exactEarth AIS feed through open-source assured content web services to relatively static chart products from UKHO.
4. We meet national, defence and civil requirements for navigational and other hydrographic information. We consistently output high quality, safe products (digital and analogue) to meet SOLAS requirements We are part of the UK Government We have over 210 years’ experience A world renowned organisation supplying navigational products and services. We produce and maintain a global series of charts and publications We advise the UK Government on policy formation We represent the UK at International Hydrographic Organisation (IHO) and other international forums Due to the nature of our mission we take a considered approach to the development of our products and services.
5. This is just a small snapshot of the type of activities; data, product and service types that we are engaged in or support.
6. We had two principal aims for the development of FMGC. These were and are: Investigate and demonstrate how future geospatial capabilities may be applied. Investigation and demonstration of capabilities to enable the management, dissemination, analysis and presentation of various datasets, services and clients to deliver a wider understanding of the maritime domain. For the former, the objective was to enable the delivery of a wider understanding of the maritime domain – ultimately enabling “Geospatial Information Superiority”. By utilising a server/client infrastructure it meant we could run the more complex and processor hungry tasks in the cloud whilst visualising both the foundation data and products in a local client with the analysis layers dropping in on top.
7. Big data analysis using the power of ArcGIS 10.4 and the geoevent extension –the ability to be alerted to shifts in “normal” vessel traffic patterns as a result of complex analysis across a plethora of foundation products and services. Automated analysis and web service publication for remote client consumption
8. The FMGC has been used to demonstrate a number of concepts including: the identification of suspicious shipping traffic; modelling the potential impact of natural disasters on shipping; identifying commercial potential for the UKHO in identifying product improvements and increasing market-share and global coverage.