Sophia Antipolis, 3 May 2019

ETSI has recently launched a new Industry Specification Group on a European Common Information Sharing Environment Service and Data Model (ISG CDM). The ETSI group will define technical standards to allow data exchange among different maritime legacy systems in a cooperative network. Enhancing information exchange between maritime surveillance authorities is one of the key strategic objectives of the European Union under the Integrated Maritime Policy with increased coordination between different policy areas (transport, environmental protection, fisheries control, border control, general law enforcement, customs and defence).

The objective of the maritime Common Information Sharing environment (CISE) is to improve maritime situational awareness by enhancing the maritime public authorities’ abilities to monitor, detect, identify, track and understand occurrences at sea in order to be able to provide reasoned grounds for reaction. Maritime CISE will ensure that information collected by one maritime authority and considered necessary for the operational activities of other authorities is shared instead of being collected and produced several times.

To promote a common understanding of information relevant to maritime surveillance, CISE must foster the use of common standards to interpret and process exchanged information by performing aggregation, correlation and data fusion. This is important to build an integrated maritime awareness picture. The ETSI ISG CDM will provide a universal data and service model that may serve as reference for all cross-sectoral and cross-border information exchange between European public authorities.

The Kick-off Meeting of the group is planned to take place in the ETSI premises in Sophia Antipolis, France, on 29 May 2019 where officials of the group will be elected and focus on specific work developed.