Ever wondered what ships are up to at sea? Windward will provide answers

Photo credit: fdecomite .

Over 90 percent of the world’s trade is facilitated by maritime trading routes. An estimated 50,000 ships ply the oceans transporting everything from food, cars, and steel. But for a sector that’s so vital to our existence and the smooth running of the global economy, there’s shockingly little transparency on what actually goes on in the high seas.

There’s no way to see the location of all the ships, like you can with planes.

The problem is that there’s no central authority that tracks and monitors all the ships traversing the ocean on any given day. The International Maritime Organization (IMO) – a United Nations body – is mainly responsible for the regulatory framework that covers global shipping routes. Ships are mandated, by law, to ping back data constantly which reveals who they are, where they’re from, what cargo they’re carrying, and what their next port of call is, but this is done entirely on a self-reporting basis. There’s a high probability of error or data manipulation.

Israel-based Windward, a maritime data and analytics company, is trying to bring visibility to this domain. The startup, which was founded by two former naval officers, processes more than 100 million data points every day to provide an accurate picture of ocean-going vessels.

No radar

“Most people assume that there’s a screen somewhere which you can turn on and see the location of all the ships, like you can with planes,” says Michal Chafets, vice president of marketing at Windward. “But that doesn’t exist. One reason for that is because of how long ships remain at sea.”

Photo credit: Ting Chen .

Michal adds that while transmitting data was mandated by the IMO, the whole system was designed so that ships don’t collide into each other on the high seas. “It wasn’t intended to be a tool to monitor ships for illegal fishing, switching identities, or carrying banned cargo,” she explains.

In the absence of an effective monitoring network, Windward estimates that approximately half of all available data is corrupted, with no vetting mechanism. And that’s an issue for maritime security agencies which don’t always know what’s on board and whether there are any possible threats.

The data it has on global cargo movements is invaluable for economists and analysts.

“We did research data manipulation in the maritime domain and we saw that 1 percent of ships transmitted false data. That’s the equivalent of a thousand people walking through JFK every day with a fake passport,” affirms Michal.

So how does Windward help the situation? Michal claims they’ve created the world’s first SaaS-based data platform for the maritime world. After gathering millions of data points every day, it fuses that together, vets it for possible manipulation, and creates an individual vessel story for over 200,000 vessels worldwide. The data will give you information on the ship’s flag, ownership, all the routes it’s covered, ports visited, as well as ship to ship transfers at sea.

“You go from massive, unreliable data to fused, vetted, and organized data. Then you can immediately determine whether a vessel is behaving anomalously to itself or relative to shipping principles. Such as, rather than going straight from point A to point B, it stops and makes a detour,” outlines Michal.

Information blackout