EFFECTOR: how IT contributes to maritime surveillance and border security

The final workshop of the European EFFECTOR project will take place this Thursday 15 September 2022, at the Manufacture des Tabacs, on the site of the Toulouse 1 Capitole University. IRIT and the SGMer (Secrétariat Général de la Mer) are organising the event. The EFFECTOR project provides an interoperability framework and associated data fusion and analysis services for maritime surveillance and border security. EFFECTOR, a collaborative project between France, Portugal and Greece, puts data at the service of maritime surveillance. 

What is Project EFFECTOR?

Ensuring safe, secure and clean seas and oceans is a priority. Adequate maritime security is needed to protect people and the EU’s strategic maritime interests. The EFFECTOR project allows for improved maritime surveillance and rescue with different levels of vision (local, regional and national) and decision support also at different levels (tactical and strategic). The project, capitalising on the CISE (Common Information Sharing Environment) environment, implements an interconnection between several proprietary national systems (at European level) while adding a semantic dimension as well as data sources that have not been exploited until now (satellite imagery, vision by drones, etc.). Within the framework of the project (which is part of a cluster of European projects on the security of the European Union’s external borders), IRIT has provided expertise in :

EFFECTOR-Brochure_2022

  • the creation of an ontology structuring the maritime vocabulary (a knowledge graph facilitating the conversion of data but also allowing reasoning allowing reasoning on these data)
  • automatic detection of maritime anomalies from ship trajectories (via learning algorithms)
  • the use of data lakes to allow the management of data of different formats and characteristics with different exploitation objectives while facilitating the consultation of these data which are in various systems with different ways of consulting them (federation of heterogeneous requests)

The principle of the project was to propose very high level tools and not prototypes. Three
IT platforms (one per Member State participating in the project) were developed and deployed in operational tests, such as in Toulon last May. To find out more, all the information is available on the project website.