Development of a maritime safety management database using relational database approach

Many types of maritime incident databases have been established that allow people to learn from past incidents and develop corresponding mitigation measures. However, our investigation of multiple international and national databases shows that most existing databases only record basic information regarding incidents in a single table. Lots of useful information is not included in the database (i.e., limited extension of the database). Meanwhile, some basic information is recorded tautologically (i.e., data redundancy). In this paper, two widely used databases are taken as examples, the Global Integrated Shipping Information System and the Lloyd's List Intelligence, to explain these common problems of existing databases. To overcome these limitations and improve the efficiency of data maintenance, this paper develops a relational maritime safety management database. The entity-relationship model is first used to depict the inter-related semantic information surrounding maritime incidents, and a relational database model is subsequently formed. Microsoft Access is employed to implement the proposed database, and a database application is also designed to demonstrate the utility of the database. Our preliminary study shows that the proposed database is implementable and has potential usage for both industry and academic research.