VALLEJO, CALIFORNIA. The National Coast Watch Council Secretariat, represented by Executive Director Jose Luis M. Alano, participated in the Global Maritime Forum (GMF) Workshop on 13-14 November 2017. The forum, with its theme “The Evolution of Big Data, Opportunities for Maritime Domain: The Importance of Public-Private-Academic Partnerships”, included series of workshops that aim to manage maritime information to ensure safety of global maritime activities.

 

The GMF 2017 provided an opportunity for the academe, private industry, federal government agencies and international partners to highlight and discuss current and emerging technologies and efforts to enhance maritime domain awareness. Leading experts facilitated panel sessions followed by group discussions designed to provide participants with an opportunity to explore topics of particular interest.

As compared with previous fora in 2015 and 2016, which centered on processes in acquiring data, the 2017 GMF Workshop focused on managing big data as well as making them available and accessible to the government, private industry, academe and international partners. Among the special topics discussed in this year’s GMF include Managing Maritime Sensor Big Data Volume and Velocity; Integrating Multi-Source Data in the Maritime Domain; Policies Impacting Open Source and Publicly Available Information; and, Developing a Maritime Data Layer Cloud/Access Backbone. In 2018, the GMF aims to focus on analyzing big data.

The GMF brought together a wide spectrum of experts coming from the different areas of cyber society. The overall objective of the GMF is that by 2019 it would be able to address “Big Data” Advanced Analytics Initiative with policy proposal of having unclassified data and analytics as an enterprise asset. It also aims to formalize the USG-Private-Academic-International Partnership.