Building on the overall vision, MARISA focuses on four major objectives:

• Create improved situational awareness with a focus on delivering a complete and useful comprehension of the situation at sea;
• Support the practitioners along the complete lifecycle of situations at sea, from the observation of elements in the environment up to detection of anomalies and aids to planning;
• Ease a fruitful collaboration among adjacent and cross-border agencies operating in the maritime surveillance sphere (Navies, Coast Guards, Customs, Border Polices) in order to pull resources towards the same goal, leading to cost efficient usage of existing resources;
• Foster a dynamic eco-system of users and providers, allowing new data fusion services, based on a “distilled” knowledge, to be delivered to different actors at sea by the integration of a wide range of data and sensors.

These objectives will be translated into a set of activities built on two major pillars:

  1.  Delivering enhanced maritime surveillance knowledge and capabilities through the MARISA toolkit 

• Fuse information and data from different sources into knowledge, capitalizing on the large amount of unexploited maritime data;
• Extend this information fusion to other data streams beyond maritime data, such as the open source intelligence coming from social networks and the Internet whilst leaving users fully in control of selecting whether or not to include such data streams;
• Ease the transformation and dissemination of this knowledge to create a shared situation awareness across different stakeholders;
• Allow stakeholders to further enrich situation awareness by integrating their own information, creating either locally enriched situation awareness and shared enriched situation awareness;
• Provide novel techniques and algorithms to collect and properly process large amount of heterogeneous data set for early warning, forensic purposes and illegal act prosecution;
• Provide the necessary means to manage the access to all the available information.

  2.  Validating the new capabilities, running trials across different user sites

• Deploy the MARISA toolkit as an enhanced set of capabilities able to interact with existing operational systems and users;
• Allow end users to decide how to exploit the MARISA added value services, ranging from direct system-tosystem connectivity to their own systems to human interaction by the means of a MSA web based console;
• Make available an operational environment to the practitioners, to test and verify the MARISA Toolkit in a variety of application segments,
• Make available through the MARISA toolkit the capability to continuously enhance, select and manage the result coming from the data fusion processes, also providing the management of user refinement feedbacks:
  an element that is key in the progressive enrichment of a consistently good actionable knowledge