The capital of maritime data in Chile

For some years now, every September 29 we commemorate World Maritime Day, an event in which we recognize the immense value that navigation and maritime transport of oceans and seas have in our lives.

By Carlos Jerez, scientific director of the Data Observatory Foundation and academic of the Faculty of Engineering and Science of the Adolfo Ibáñez University.- From the curiosity to explore continents to the most recent and unlikely logistical difficulties caused by COVID-19, there is no doubt that maritime transport is and will continue to be key to human development. So much so that it represents 80% of all commercial exchanges worldwide. So why celebrate something so everyday? Precisely because of the urgent need to generate innovations to guarantee this activity in a sustainable way.

Today, most of the cargo is transported thanks to particularly polluting fossil fuels, which presents great challenges in terms of energy efficiency and decarbonization. P

At the same time, there is an urgent need to efficiently secure and manage maritime transport, create sustainable infrastructure and world-class standards. All of the above implies that we must not only improve the designs and associated technologies: we must consider all the richness and complexity of data thrown by thousands of sensors, monitoring stations, navigation systems, among many other sources; to accommodate substantive improvements, for better decision-making holistically.

Thanks to the progress of data science and satellite monitoring technologies of the Earth, today it is possible to access information in real time about our oceans, the position and situation of ships or the state of maritime routes, for the rest, during many years of observation that today allows us see the evolution of all the previous conditions.

Thus, we can not only measure indicators associated with climate change; we can better infer and generate scenarios, study and anticipate measures along with their impacts.

A few years ago, the Australian government issued a report for the Asia Pacific Economic Collaboration (APEC) in which the impact of this information is in the order of billions of dollars.

Chile, hand in hand with Fundación Data Observatory, a public, private and academic non-profit initiative, initially conceived to take advantage of the algorithmic and technological advances associated with the immensity of data coming from astronomical observatories in our country, has worked hard to store, process, curate and make available multiple data sources associated with our seas.

For example, today it is possible to access 38 years of satellite data from a personal computer thanks to the recent project datacube, or providing georeferenced information on fishing quotas, or even those of the reading of the seabed of Magellan. These data are made available to researchers around the world, so that they can access analyzed and processed information, and thus promote R&D&i with Chilean data.

Soon, Chile will host the Océan Hackathon together with the Campus Mundial del Mar and the French Institute for Research in Sciences and Digital Technologies (Inria), which seeks to solve global challenges associated with the sea. These types of initiatives are capable of testing the skills and creativity of human capital specialized in the field together with data experts in Chile, forming collaborative communities and evidencing the power of data as innovation capital.

Thus, just like hundreds of years ago, the future of navigation is reconnecting with space observation, but this time through data.