A Study of Marine Incidents Databases in the Baltic Sea Region

A comprehensive risk analysis makes use of different datasets. Marine incidents data are essentially important datasets. The purpose of this study is to analyse marine incident databases in the BSR (Baltic Sea Region). The marine incident data in the region are inhabited by a wide rage of issues, such as limited data accessibility and availability, and the diversity in data quality, structure, amount, accuracy, degree of detail and languages. Preparing for the data analysis is a very cumbersome, labour intensive, time consuming and expensive process. Merging different datasets from different countries into a single dataset is a very difficult process, if not impossible for a complete data merging. The paper provides experiences on how to overcome some of these issues and proposes some suggestions for improvements in the future.