Semantics of Maritime Routes: Conciliating complementary views

The notion of maritime route is widely used in describing, modelling or analysing maritime navigation. However, the term conveys several meanings and views differ on its very definition. In this paper, we propose an overview of different perspectives of maritime route from navigation, to surveillance, to data science. In this respect, our description covers both realms of truth and estimation on the one hand, and both prospective and retrospective standpoints on the other hand. This partition distinguishes between four views of maritime routes, namely true prospective, prospective estimated, true retrospective and retrospective estimated that are further described in the paper. Besides identifying and characterising the different perspectives, this classification also conciliates the different notions of maritime route used across domains, and provides a basis for a shared conceptualisation amongst data scientists and navigation practitioners.