Wow... I had no idea this kind of manifest information was publicly available. I'm kind of unreasonably excited by this.
Using the Enigma datadata I was able to figure find at least one major vendor another player in my industry uses. That information isn't publicly disclosed elsewhere. Really interesting stuff.
I seem to recall an article online somewhere about 10-15 years ago that described the process that Apple used when shipping desktop computers. They used some sort of freight forwarding company and were able to mask the owner and contents of the shipping containers to protect against theft as well as speculation by competitors as to the type and number of computers in each container.
yes, I imagine if you are interested in masking this information it's absolutely possible but requires some effort. Still interesting to have this as a tool when investigating companies.
Provides cargo specifications pertaining to each incoming shipment, for 2017, updated weekly. Details include shipment ID's, container numbers and descriptions, and piece counts.
Where exactly can you retrieve the actual bill of lading document in pdf or image format? Enigma's dataset seems to have it all broken down into rows and columns.
What I'm looking for is the actual source documents like this example:
What kind of patterns would be interesting to find out in this dataset? A thought came in to my mind to do some data acrobatics and possibly publish a dashboard based on this data if I can arrange some extra time.. (didnt check any possible terms of use for the data yet)
It would be interesting to be able to pick a company and then track the flow of goods to/from that company.
For example, I was interested in a particular company so I looked them up, found shipments, searched another table for the shipper, and then googled to find out what they make.
But being able to more easily navigate that would be interesting, who else does that supplier ship to? The shipments I saw looked kind of regular, but plotting them on a timeline, with weights, would give me a better understanding of what's happening.
Can I correlate shipment sizes with earnings etc? I think there are lots of interesting things to look for.
This could be used for trading I am sure. Proabably already is. Know a company's expected numbers before they are released by correlating ahipments over time.
Very very cool. I am reminded of the parking lot analysis from satellite photos some traders were doing.
In light of this comment, the sibling comment with the joke link to a space-sim video game cargo scanner seems fitting; pretty sure in-game piracy is the primary use of a cargo scanner in that fictional world, and I wouldn't be surprised if it ended up the same in the real world.
So is this tool meant as a road-map to literal pirates, so they can know what to target and when, or is it to let folks know what pirates know, so they can be taken out by the navies of the world?
Seriously - AIS "provides position, speed, heading and other metadata about its movements" and Enigma public gives "what the ship contains".
You could use it as a basis for an AR type 'virtual pirate' game, where you navigate your pirate vessel around the worlds oceans, trying to track and board actual ships. You would get points based on the types of cargo they contain, and success could be determined by statistics on actual piracy, proximity of naval vessels, public information about the owners previous responses to attacks etc. With the money you earn from stealing cargo you can 'buy' a better pirate ship, or 'employ' more virtual pirates to increase success...? Could be a pretty simple Android or iOS app to write?
I have a marinetraffic.com antenna at home, tried it late last night. The data I get seems a bit out of date (July), so as I understand it, it's US-only at the moment.
Nice idea, but scrapping MarineTraffic.com data is against the terms, according to MarineTraffic.com. They provide a premium API for that. There are very few real-time AIS data sources that are freely available to the public unfortunately.
What an ingenius way to combine two seemingly 'harmless' datasets to reveal powerful insights! I'm sure there are many other possible/potential ways to combine publicly available data, hmmm...
Using the Enigma datadata I was able to figure find at least one major vendor another player in my industry uses. That information isn't publicly disclosed elsewhere. Really interesting stuff.