Critical maritime events present substantial social, environmental, and economic risks, particularly as climate change increases the frequency and severity of hazardous weather along major maritime trade routes. This paper presents a weather-aware vessel rerouting framework that integrates real-time meteorological forecasts with large-scale historical vessel traffic patterns from the Kpler MarineTraffic Platform observed under diverse sea conditions, aiming to enhance navigational safety during extreme weather events while maintaining maritime operational efficiency. The core of the proposed approach is a modified A* search algorithm, where edge weights are dynamically assigned based on forecasted weather severity and historical vessel trip density, as a function of the prevailing sea state. The approach is evaluated using randomly selected origin-destination pairs across the southeastern U.S. Coast in September 2022, a period when a range of weather scenarios in terms of severity, spatial extent, and duration. Results indicate a 16.97% reduction in median cumulative weather penalties in variable sea conditions and a 35.03% decrease very extreme sea conditions when compared to shortest-path routing. A case study for Hurricane Fiona (Category 4, 21 September 2022) further demonstrates the system's ability to entirely avoid areas forecasted to experience extreme sea conditions. Findings highlight the value of integrating AIS-based collective fleet intelligence with weather data from historical databases to improve voyage planning and vessel operations in dynamically changing sea conditions.

The wide spread of Automatic Identification System (AIS) has motivated several maritime analytics operations. Vessel Location Forecasting (VLF) is one of the most critical operations for maritime awareness. However, accurate VLF is a challenging problem due to the complexity and dynamic nature of maritime traffic conditions. Furthermore, as privacy concerns and restrictions have grown, training data has become increasingly fragmented, resulting in dispersed databases of several isolated data silos among different organizations, which in turn decreases the quality of learning models. In this paper, we propose an efficient VLF solution based on LSTM neural networks, in two variants, namely Nautilus and FedNautilus for the centralized and the federated learning approach, respectively. We also demonstrate the superiority of the centralized approach with respect to current state of the art and discuss the advantages and disadvantages of the federated against the centralized approach.

We present a Maritime Situational Awareness (MSA) framework for detecting and forecasting maritime events (e.g., illegal fishing) over streams of Big maritime Data. The architecture of the MSA framework relies on the following state-of-the-art components: (i) the Maritime Event Detector which uses data-driven distributed techniques deployed on a computer cluster to detect maritime events of interest in an online, real-time fashion, (ii) the Complex Event Forecasting module, which implements state-of-the-art distributed Complex Event Forecasting techniques for maritime data, (iii) the Synopses Data Engine component, that creates synopses of maritime data improving the scalability of the framework and (iv) the streaming extension of a popular data science platform, namely RapidMiner Studio, that integrates all the above, allowing users to graphically design and rapidly implement Big Data analytics pipelines which can be deployed transparently on top of distributed architectures.

Copernicus is the European programme for monitoring the Earth.It consists of a set of systems that collect data from satellites and in-situ sensors, process this data and provide users with reliable and up-to-date information on a range of environmental and security issues.The data and information processed and disseminated puts Copernicus at the forefront of the big data paradigm, giving rise to all relevant challenges, the so-called 5 Vs: volume, velocity, variety, veracity and value.In this short paper, we discuss the challenges of extracting information and knowledge from huge archives of Copernicus data.We propose to achieve this by scale-out distributed deep learning techniques that run on very big clusters offering virtual machines and GPUs.We also discuss the challenges of achieving scalability in the management of the extreme volumes of information and knowledge extracted from Copernicus data.The envisioned scientific and technical work will be carried out in the context of the H2020 project ExtremeEarth which starts in January 2019.

The volume of available spatial data that is generated and collected has significantly increased in the last few years. A number of applications based on Map-Reduce-like systems and cloud infrastructure have emerged. These applications offer a variety of features, however they differ in terms of spatial functions, partitioning and indexing. In this paper we present our own implementation that enables spatial support for distributed execution of spatial SQL queries as part of the system Exareme. Then, we evaluate some of the State-of-the-Art existing geospatial distributed systems, emphasizing on systems based on Apache Spark. We conduct detailed functional and performance benchmarks that include corner cases that stress the systems in comparison and reveal their advantages and weaknesses in both functionality and performance.

Copernicus is the European program for monitoring the Earth. It consists of a set of complex systems that collect data from satellites and in-situ sensors, process this data and provide users with reliable and up-to-date information on a range of environmental and security issues. The data collected by Copernicus is made available freely following an open access policy. Information extracted from Copernicus data is disseminated to users through the Copernicus services which address six thematic areas: land, marine, atmosphere, climate, emergency and security. We present a demo from the Horizon 2020 Copernicus App Lab project which takes big data from the Copernicus land service, makes it available on the Web as linked geospatial data and interlinks it with other useful public data to aid the development of applications by developers that might not be Earth Observation experts. Our demo targets a scenario where we want to study the "greenness" of Paris.

Some particularly important rich sources of open and free big geospatial data are the Earth observation (EO) programs of various countries such as the Landsat program of the US and the Copernicus programme of the European Union. EO data is a paradigmatic case of big data and the same is true for the big information and big knowledge extracted from it. EO data (satellite images and in-situ data), and the information and knowledge extracted from it, can be utilized in many applications with financial and environmental impact in areas such as emergency management, climate change, agriculture and security.

In the database community Polystores is an emerging and promising approach for data federation that aims at designing a unified querying layer over multiple data models. In the Semantic Web community a similar in spirit approach of Ontology-Based Data Access (OBDA) has been recently proposed, attracted a lot of attention, and proved its success in several industrial scenarios. In this paper we discuss a semantic approach to building polystores using the OBDA paradigm. We also present our system Optique that is utilized in an industrial application of performing turbine diagnostics in Siemens.

TELEIOS is a recent European project that addresses the need for scalable access to petabytes of Earth Observation data and the discovery and exploitation of knowledge that is hidden in them. TELEIOS builds on scientific database technologies (array databases, SciQL, data vaults) and Semantic Web technologies (stRDF and stSPARQL) implemented on top of a state of the art column store database system (MonetDB). We demonstrate a first prototype of the TELEIOS Virtual Earth Observatory (VEO) architecture, using a forest fire monitoring application as example.