The sea is a dangerous
environment for man. Statistics on marine accident claims recorded by P&I
Clubs suggest that human error is responsible directly for 60% of
accidents and indirectly for a further 30%. In many cases it’s a matter of
“communication”: the Maritime Transport Industry is made up by a large
number of players who currently establish interconnections between their
information technology systems (IT) by using telex, phone, VHF and fax.
The usage of such systems can, as no established standard for information
exchange exist, in conjunction with poor communication connections and
linguistic difficulties lead to misunderstandings and mistakes, with
disastrous consequences.
MSML (Maritime Safety Markup Language) is a
language for structuring
information related to the
maritime sector. MSML was first
developed during the RTD (Research and Technological Development) project
MANATEE. One of the goals for the MANATEE project was to create an
open standard for information exchange that could be used
generally in the maritime sector.
MSML is an XML application, implemented using
the XML Schema representation.
It is
contained in a separate document that could be used for validation of
MSML instances (see Publications section for MSML schema). The first purpose of MSML
is to make it possible to record safety related information in
relation to repair and maintenance. The second purpose is to define an
extensible structure that could be developed in future versions of
MSML. Note that MSML should not primarily be seen as a support for
normal work onboard a vessel. Instead it is an add-on support for
transfers of safety related information to/from the vessel.
MSML enables security handling and since MSML concerns safety
aspects there is information support for:
- preventing accidents
- minimizing extent of damage
- minimizing criticality of consequences
These aspects concern both the vessel and bases ashore.
MSML consists of the following constituents:
- administrative support – that defines the handling of the XML
application instance as a file.
- security support – that defines the handling of data
security. MSML enables digital signatures and encryption via the
W3C recommendations “XML Encryption Syntax and Processing”
and “XML-Signature Syntax and Processing”.
- data model – that defines the data of interest. The basic parts
of the data model are vessel static and dynamic areas, shore
base static and dynamic areas and vessel shore base relation. Each
of these can be created successively and thus validation
can be made even if information is not complete.
- perspective – that defines the data viewed from different
perspectives as inspections, repairs, maintenance, cargo etc.
In the perspective section so far the following are defined:
- inspection – that contains information related to
externally made inspections.
- repair and maintenance – that contains the corresponding information.
A fundamental property of MSML is that it does not consider the actual
use of data e.g. there is no specification of MSML messages. This
makes it practical to use MSML in a large variety of applications and
without modifying the definition of MSML.
The Publications section contains
two MANATEE reports,
deliverable D2.1, which
describes in a general way the
features of XML and its
applications as MSML, and
deliverable D2.2,
which describes the MSML
application, i.e. it contains nearly the same information as the XML Schema
representation but expressed in plain English. In this way it is
possible to discuss and evaluate MSML without knowing the syntax
details of XML Schema. D2.2 also contains rules and guidelines
associated with MSML.
