1. Use of UN/LOCODE by IMO
Hakan Demirlioglu Geneva, November 2017

2. IMO mission: safe, secure and efficient shipping on clean oceans

3. Contents Use of UN/LOCODE by IMO IMO at a short glance
Data synchronization of the UN/LOCODE releases by IMO
Good afternoon my name is HD, I have been working for MSA&IS department of IMO for the last two years.
Today, I’m going to provide two presentations, my first presentation is about the use of UN/LOCODEs in IMO, in particular how we maintain the UN/LOCODE list.

4. The International Maritime Organization (IMO)
IMO at a short glance
The International Maritime Organization (IMO)
Specialized United Nations agency
Headquarters in London, the United Kingdom since 1958
5 regional offices (Côte d'Ivoire, Ghana, Kenya, the Philippines and Trinidad and Tobago)
172 Member States, 3 Associate Members
140+ observer organizations (IGOs and NGOs)
Secretariat of 300+ staff, of more than 50 nationalities
Before going into details, I would like to make a few words about my organization. IMO is the United Nations specialized agency with responsibility for the safety and security of shipping and the prevention of marine pollution by ships.
IMO has 172 Member States, Which includes all major ship owning nations and all major coastal states.

5. GISIS: Global Integrated Shipping Information System
An in-house information and data management system
A tool to fulfil their reporting obligations in the implementation of IMO instruments.
A tool to give access to, and circulate, data reported to, or compiled by, the Secretariat.
FOR MEMBER STATES
FOR THE
SECRETARIAT
IMO receives a lot of data from its Member States, who are fulfilling their reporting requirements to the Organization.
GISIS is IMO’s web-based information portal, which is developed to assist Member States in their reporting. Prior to GISIS those reports were coming in , fax and letter format.
GISIS is hosted at IMO in London. It is completely built and operated in house using the Secretariat resources.
The IMO Secretariat process the data collected from Member States, and makes it available to working groups/correspondence groups and other bodies of the Organization to facilitate their work.
Also the data is made available to public, where the information is not confidential or sensitive, otherwise the data is only made accessible to Member authorized users.

6. GISIS: Global Integrated Shipping Information System
Member have their own set of users:
New users created/removed at any time
Specific permissions for each user
Access rights of IGOs and NGOs when restricted
Public access through registration
There are approximately 210,000 public-registered IMO web accounts with access to the public area of GISIS. And there are approximately 17,000 Member-authorized accounts have access to the Members' Area of GISIS
There are three main interactions of GISIS with external users and systems.
The primary access method is through the web interface, users can access Public Area, IMO Members’ Area and IMO Secretariat Area.
Access to GISIS web interface is free of charge however it requires registration.   
Second main interaction of GISIS with other data systems is based on automated data exchange. It facilitates automatic data transfers between national or regional information systems and IMO.
And finally, custom data input from other entities, such as ship and company particulars data we are receiving from IHS Maritime and Trade.
210,000 public users
17,000 Member-authorized users

7. GISIS: Global Integrated Shipping Information System
Secretariat’s validation
( UN agreed terminologies, personal data protection…)
Or agreement by relevant IMO bodies
Member State Data
GISIS
In principle, Member States are the owner of the data they reported. However, the IMO Secretariat carries out a validation process to ensure the data provided is inline with the UN agreed terminologies and personal data protection rules. The data will be made available to other Members and to Public after this validation process.

8. Partnerships Abandonment of seafarers & Port State Control UN/LOCODES
IMO is in cooperation with different international organizations to provide data standardization.
Global record for fishing vessels

9. Partnerships Since 2000 Data exchange
For the European Commission and the Member States
Information on maritime safety
Facilitate cooperation
Connected to the module on marine casualties and incidents for electronic data transfer in order to avoid duplication of reporting
And also in close cooperation with regional information systems. For instance, we receive Port State Control data from Regional PSC regimes and Casualty data from EMSA through the established data exchange facilities.

10. UN/LOCODE – Use in GISIS
Core data
Live
Countries – Contracting Governments, Territories, Flag Administrations, ISO coded
Ports – Listing of international ports, UN/LOCODEs
ShipTypes: IHS Markit StatCode 5 coding system …
Maritime Security
Port Reception Facilities
Marine Casualties and Incidents
Contact Points
Recognized Organizations
Pollution Prevention Equipment
Condition Assessment Scheme
Piracy and Armed Robbery
Stowaways and Illegal Migrants
MARPOL Annex VI
Communications and SAR
LRIT Data Distribution Plan
Port State Control
Ship Particulars
Dangerous Goods Carriage
(and more...)
Currently GISIS consists of 32 modules, with a further three under development. You can find some of these modules listed on the screen.
The UN/LOCODE data of 5-letter port codes is used as a core data component within different GISIS modules to identify ports. Just like the country code of ISO

11. Updating UN/LOCODEs in GISIS
No automated update procedure for the new UN/LOCODE releases
Update based on the request of IMO Member States
if the request is in line with the latest UN/LOCODE release, it is applied,
if the requested is not in line with the latest UN/LOCODE release; Member States are guided to update their port list in UN/LOCODE, before applying the update in GISIS,
update required in GISIS at a short timescale,
As it is widely used in GISIS as reference, IMO has a keen interest in ensuring that UN/LOCODE data is of high accuracy.
Currently, the UN/LOCODE list used in IMO is maintained by the IMO Secretariat.
IMO has adopted procedures whereby Member States are requested to notify any changes to port details to the IMO Secretariat for it to be implemented in GISIS.
Thus, updating the UN/LOCODEs in GISIS is not automated based on the new published version of UN/LOCODE.
The IMO Secretariat guides IMO Member States to update their port information within UN/LOCODE before implementing the corresponding change within GISIS. However, this is a best-effort approach and the IMO Secretariat does not guarantee that any Member State has accurately updated UN/LOCODE with the identical information as provided to IMO.
One of the main reason to this is that Member States require port information to be updated in GISIS at a short timescale, and it may take up to six months to see the new code in the published UNLOCODE list.

12. Updating UN/LOCODEs in GISIS
IMO uses a specific form for maintaining the UN/LOCODE list in GISIS.
For adding a new port code, we just fill this form and save it.
For the updates and deletion of an existing UN/LOCODE, first we check for the records in GISIS before we implement the change.
If there is a one to one change in the UN/LOCODE list like deleting an existing port code and replacing it with a new one, we have a specific tool which migrates all the dependent records.

13. Updating UN/LOCODEs in GISIS
Dependencies & References in GISIS modules
This table shows dependencies of the UNLOCODEs of a selected country in GISIS modules.
We use this interface to make sure that there is no dependent record remaining in GISIS before we delete any UN/LOCODE from our list.
This interface is also important that it shows how IMO is dependent on the UN/LOCODEs.
Depending on the change in the UN/LOCODE list, it may have huge impact on the system.
For instance, if the UNLOCODE for Singapore port is changed, hundreds of records in four different GISIS modules will be affected.

14. Conclusion
Consequences of the changes in UN/LOCODE should be considered carefully
Divergence between the latest UN/LOCODE release and the list of ports used in GISIS
Automatic updating of changes in UN/LOCODE (e.g. using XML)
A clean-up process is required at IMO
IMO information system heavily depends on the UNLOCODEs and especially changes effecting large number of ports will make a huge impact in our system as it would make in many other information systems. Thus, having additional measures for such changes is important as discussed during the previous UN/LOCODE meetings.
Due to the procedure applied at IMO, we are aware of that there is some degree of divergence exists between the original UN/LOCODE list and the list used in GISIS.
Ideally, GISIS should be based strictly on the latest version of the UN/LOCODE database, however, to do this updating of the UN/LOCODE list should be easy and quick.
We are looking forward to see the output of the re-engineering process. The use of live data exchange for receiving updates to UN/LOCODE will be a big way forward for us. To make use of the live data, IMO will carry out a one-off clean-up process at IMO data systems to realign our UNLOCODE list with the original list.

15. flickr.com/photos/ imo-un/collections
Any questions?
Thank you so much for your attention. Should you have any question, I would be very delighted to try to answer them in question and answer session.
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