Fishing Vessel Monitoring Systems: Past, Present and Future

VMS: Past, Present and Future 25
of his reasoning and decision making process into an FMC, as an automated
process, would require an expert to devise schematic rendering of the
movements that each type of vessel might make whilst fishing.
Once done, it would then be necessary to programme a computer to recognize
those schematic renderings, knowing that each one will be, in some way,
different from all the others: variations in speed, length, and directions would be
significant. One might even use the analogy of programming a computer to
recognize the handwriting or voices of different people. Anyone who has had to
edit a text created by optical character recognition from even a printed text can
begin to understand the complexity of matching unclassified movements to
general visual patterns.
And with all of this complexity, we are still assuming that the data under analysis
is correct. Suppose that the analytical process is applied to determining whether
data might be genuine of falsified. This is a level of analysis that goes
significantly beyond the relatively simple pattern recognition of fishing activity and
would take the FMC software into areas used by financial institutions when they
are trying to detect fraudulent transactions of, for example, credit cards.
Suffice it to say that in an area such a VMS where the systems suppliers tend to
be very small companies with severely limited research activities, and where very
large installations cost no more than $500,000, it is simply unreasonable to
expect that the entities involved underwrite such research using their own
resources. The only solution is that the research be carried out for, say,
consortia of fisheries compliance, protection and management entities, or by
publicly funded research and development programmes.
4.6 Galileo system
In developing and implementing its Galileo satellite communications system, the
European Union is taking head-on what has been until now a monopoly of the
government of the USA. And whilst this competition has serious implications, for
users of satellite navigation systems the implications can only be positive.
Galileo will boast a significant number of advantages, compared to GPS, such as
improved accuracy and institutional support, and one can expect that the
advantages of these improvements will be routinely integrated into product
offerings by manufacturers of maritime equipment.
But most important, for practitioners of VMS, will be a number of particularities of
the Galileo system that can be used to assure the integrity of retransmitted
position, course and speed data. These advantages are of such key importance
that there is every reason to believe that Galileo will become the industry