EU Integrates Maritime Surveillance Data

The European Commission has set in motion the project of bringing together surveillance data from civil and military authorities like coast guards, navies, traffic monitoring, environmental and pollution monitoring, fisheries and border control, so duplication of work can be avoided and savings of up to €400m ($544.5m) per year can be made.

Increased cooperation and sharing of data would help cope more efficiently with real time events at sea such as accidents, pollution incidents, crime or security threats, the Commission said.

CISE, the Common Information Sharing Environment for the maritime domain, aims at making all the relevant actors come together and share data.

Maria Damanaki, Commissioner for Maritime Affairs and Fisheries, said: “Sustainable economic growth within the maritime sector can only be ensured if our seas and oceans are safe and secure.

CISE aims to make sure that all involved maritime surveillance actors have a complete picture of all events at sea.

Sharing such information is key to avoid duplication in collection of data and for the use of patrol ships, planes, helicopters or satellites in the same sea areas.

Today, about 40% of information is collected several times and 40% to 80% of information is not shared amongst the interested users. We cannot afford such a waste of efforts and money”.

The main focus of the CISE Roadmap should be to further enhance information exchange – in particular between civil and military authorities, to better interconnect existing maritime surveillance systems and make them inter-operational.

In the near future, the Commission intends to launch a project under the EU’s 7th Framework Programme for Research in order to test Maritime CISE on a large scale.

It will also produce a handbook, together with Member States, on best practice recommendations on how to apply CISE based on experience from existing systems and pilot projects like MARSUNO, Bluemassmed and Cooperation.

[mappress]
Press Release, July 9th, 2014