Web Mapping of Geo-tagged Shipping Information; Case Study: The LLOYDS Lists
ISBN 978-85-88783-11-9
Authors
1Mobasheri, A.
1GISCIENCE RESEARCH GROUP, HEIDELBERG UNIVERSITY Email: amin.mobasheri@geog.uni-heidelberg.de
Abstract
ABSTRACT: Since the late seventeenth century, the shipping newspaper LLOYD’s List and its direct predecessors contain weekly and later daily information on global shipping. The core of the Lists’ mostly tabular contents is formed by the categories Shipping Intelligence”, “Speakings”, “Foreign Mail”,“Casualities”, and “War”. Specifically, the first two categories are essential in our research. The “Shipping Intelligence” consists of exhaustive lists of the arrivals, departures and other nautical activities of civilian ships in practically all important ports of the world. The “Speakings” list sightings of ships at the high seas and give both the sighted and the reporting ship with name and geographical coordinates. The “Speakings” and “Intelligence” hold much information that with a primarily quantitative approach, will allow us to analyze, for instance, the shifting patterns of shipping routes; the time it took to get information, goods, and humans from one harbor to another depending on the year and season; the “black spots” and interruptions of service due to natural disasters or wars; the shifts in trade intensity between specific regions; the constantly changing patterns of transcontinental/international trade and migration; or, in short, the transformation of a variety of “global spaces” during times of rapid globalization. A state-of-the art literature review has been carried out in order to understand the correct visualization techniques for visualizing both Shipping Intelligence and Speakings information in the World Wide Web. Furthermore, the OGC standards for Web Mapping Service (WMS), Web Feature Service (WFS) and Web Processing Service (WPS) are used in order to design and develop a Web GIS for visualization and analysis of Lloyds’ data. The WFS is responsible of reading and storing data from/to geo-database. The WMS is connected to WFS and renders and visualizes the data on the web browser. In addition, for each method to be applied on the LLOYD's list a WPS would be developed and various services are chained together in order to respond to users’ queries. OpenLayers, JavaScript, and HTML 5.0 are the technologies that are employed for map visualization on the user interface and its connection with the services.
Keywords
Web Mapping; Visualization; Historical LLOYD'S Lists