Overview
Combating irregular migration, human smuggling, terrorism at sea, piracy, as well as arms and drug trafficking has become a high priority on Europe’s security agenda. Securing the sea requires a day-to-day collaboration activities among European actors of maritime surveillance, Member States’ administrations and European agencies principally, and a significant number of initiatives are being taken at EU level to address this challenge. The large amount of ‘raw data’ available today are not usable by systems supporting maritime security since they are not accessible at the same time and, often, they are not interoperable. Therefore, the overarching goal of MARISA project is to provide the security communities operating at sea with a data fusion toolkit, which makes available a suite of methods, techniques and modules to correlate and fuse various heterogeneous and homogeneous data and information from different sources, including Internet and social networks, with the aim to improve information exchange, situational awareness, decision-making and reaction capabilities. The proposed solution will provide mechanisms to get insights from any big data source, perform analysis of a variety of data based on geographical and spatial representation, use techniques to search for typical and new patterns that identify possible connections between events, explore predictive analysis models to represent the effect of relationships of observed object at sea. Enterprise and ad-hoc reporting and services, within the CISE context, will be provided to support users and operational systems in their daily activities, as well as presentation tools for navigating and visualizing results of data fusion processing. The involvement of 5 practitioners as full partners will allow on the one hand to align innovation to user needs, on the other hand to validate the toolkit through a number of trials addressing cross country/cross domain applications.