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SeaSWIM overview

SeaSWIM – Enabling Digitization of the Maritime Industry

Why?

Sea System Wide Information Management (SeaSWIM) was defined within the MONALISA 2.0 project to realize the potential of the existing data and information in the maritime industry.

What?

The fundamental goal for SeaSWIM is to provide and maintain a harmonized way of communicating within the maritime industry. Current maritime information is often restricted to a certain organization or department because of incompatible standards and technologies. Unifying the way maritime stakeholders communicate enable a common information marketplace and strengthen the ecosystem by providing new interoperable ways of interaction.

How?

By defining a limited set of open industry standards and best practices, SeaSWIM provides an environment where different services can interoperate over organizational boundaries. Furthermore, by providing a standardized environment service developers can focus on value creation to a wider range of customers instead of working on compliance with redundant standards.

Once communication standards are defined, the consecutive goal of SeaSWIM is to facilitate the access and flow of data and information. This means providing solutions to promote trust and lower the barriers of entry for potential data and information providers and consumers. To achieve this, SeaSWIM is envisioned to provide a reference for all common functionality needed by the ecosystem of stakeholders. For example, identity, authentication and service management are recognized as common needs that are provided as SeaSWIM support services.

Setup Principles

SeaSWIM consists of specific support services that will ensure interoperability of the STM application services by facilitating data sharing in a common information environment and structure. The specification of SeaSWIM is developed to adhere to some key STM principles:

  • Only authenticated identities can provide and consume STM services.
  • The owner of data is the actor responsible for the original creation and provision. The owner has full control over the access management for this data.
  • STM strives after a service oriented and highly decentralized architecture.
  • Usage of open and widely accepted industry standards wherever these exist.

 

SeaSWIM consists of two central services of Maritime Connectivity Platform: the Identity Registry and the Service Registry. The Identity Registry enables identity management and authentication mechanisms, while the Service Registry provides functionality to publish and find services, their functionality and endpoints.
After the initial registration and filtering process of the central services (Identity Registry and Service Registry) the communication is primarily between the provider and the consumer (see Figure 1).

Figure 1: General overview of the SeaSWIM support services showing the Connector, the Service and Identity Registers along with the decentralized communication pattern between a service provider (Application Service 1) and a service consumer (Application Service 2) shown in red.

There exists two potential ways to connect to the SeaSWIM environment. The first option is to follow the SeaSWIM technical specification and compliance document to align with its requirements. The second option is to host the STM provided reference “SeaSWIM Connector” (SSC) as is and use its interface to reach STM and its connected actors and services. All function calls to the core SeaSWIM support services (Identity Registry and Service Registry) will be accepted as long as they adhere to the same standards as the SeaSWIM reference connector.

Extraction of the actor specific data or information and translation to the appropriate STM format is performed by the various maritime actors.

For more information on the STM Validation Project application of SeaSWIM see document below:

SeaSWIM-Specification-v3.0