An Ontology for Digital Maritime Regulations

Abstract

The set of regulations that apply to ships and ports is already large and is increasing. Also, the long lifetime of ships, the different phases of ship operations and the large number of parties involved in the compliance and enforcement processes increase the need to make maritime regulations available in a machine-readable format.

In this paper, we describe the process of making maritime regulations machine-readable and how this can improve the compliance and enforcement for ship and port actors.

A maritime ontology has been defined and can be used by legislators when drafting new regulations. For ports, machine-readable regulations can be linked directly to the port procedures, and thus help port stakeholders to assess the impact of new regulations and trace their legislative origin. For ship operators, the maintenance and creation of Ship Management Systems can be simplified if machine-readable regulations are used to give an overview existing regulations.