E-compliance milestone
e-Compliance, a partly EU funded research project on maritime regulations, has announced the delivery of its first major milestone: The Maritime Thesaurus and Ontology.
The e-Compliance thesaurus is a hierarchically structured controlled vocabulary containing a large number of terms (or “concepts”) that are frequently used in maritime regulations. It is intended to be used as a reference vocabulary for the drafting of maritime rules and regulations. The thesaurus distinguishes between a “preferred label” and one or more synonymous “alternative labels” for a concept. It thus encourages the use of “official”, unambiguous terms for given concepts (e.g. “fishing vessel” instead of “fishing boat”) which will help unify and streamline the language used in regulation texts.
In contrast, the e-Compliance ontology is a data structure to model the maritime regulations domain. It is intended to capture the “meaning” of regulations in a computer-readable fashion. The ontology contains so-called “classes” which describe the objects in the domain – ships, ports, regulation documents or even people and their roles. These classes are then linked in a meaningful way to capture the content of regulations.
These e-Compliance tools are the first of their kind that are specifically designed for the maritime regulations domain; they are intended to lessen the burden for those that need to create, enforce and comply with maritime rules and regulations.
e-Compliance partners include: Acciona Trasmediterranea, BMT Group, DNV GL, Danaos Shipping, Inlecom Systems, Marintek, Maritime Administration of Latvia, Portic Barcelona, TNO, Temis, Marseille Gyptis International.
By Jake Frith
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