Ships are equipped with several kinds of navigation equipments which generate huge amount of data. Although these data have been mainly used for the safe navigation of ships, their usability can be enhanced if they are managed on a database. Because these data have different formats according to the kinds of equipments, however, an integrated database is required. This thesis presents a design and implementation of such database.
International Electro-technical Commission(IEC) is preparing the standard, IEC 61162-450, which specifies data exchange between shipboard equipments. This thesis adopts the standard as the basis of integrated
information management. Data in the form of sentences specified in the standard, NMEA 0183 ver. 4.0, are collected from the shipboard networks, and then transformed and saved in a database. The database, in turn, can provide several information services to applications.
However, the database may become full soon, because huge amount of data are saved continuously. To cope with this problem, this thesis proposes a multistage database methodology which can always keep the database under
full by means of sampling mechanism. The data of the database are sampled, and then saved in another database, called second stage database. To prevent overflow of the database, some old data which already sampled can be deleted from the database. By this way, shipboard data are stably collected and managed, and then applied to the safe and efficient navigation of ships.
To verify the functionality of the methodology, a prototype system has been implemented and tested. It is expected to become a component of e-Navigation implementation in the future.