Ship Tracking, One Observation at a Time
A local AIS archive turns passing ship positions into a history we can inspect.
Body
A dot on a map tells you where a ship was observed. A series of dots starts telling a more useful story: where it has been, how its route changes, and where the record has gaps.
MMG’s AIS Intelligence Pipeline explores that idea on consumer hardware. It receives vessel observations and stores them as structured local history, instead of throwing them away after the map updates.
Save the observations
AIS messages give the pipeline observations to retain and compare. The early work points toward storage and indexing as important practical constraints, rather than heavy computation for every incoming message. It is a narrow field experiment, not a benchmark of every possible deployment.
With history available, we can investigate questions about routes and changes over time. The quality of those answers still depends on coverage: a missing receipt is a gap in the record, not proof that a vessel stopped or vanished.
The collector and the public map are different
The website’s geographic map displays 1,669 received positions from an October 6, 2026 snapshot. It includes zoom, marker receipt times and stale-data information. It does not refresh automatically from the local collector.
That distinction matters when exploring maritime data. Receipt time describes an observation in this dataset; it is not a guarantee of a ship’s present location. The page is a progress demonstration, not a navigation service.
A foundation for better questions
The project connects MMG’s data-intelligence practice with EMO’s interest in systems that work from recorded evidence. First collect a useful history, then test what can responsibly be learned from it.
Longer histories, individual-vessel timelines and continuous public updates are further work. For now, the experiment offers something concrete: observations that can be revisited, and a map that makes their age visible.