Visual Analytics for Fishing Vessel Operations

Abstract

This thesis presents VA-TRaC, a geovisual analytics application developed in collaboration with the Norwegian Directorate of Fisheries. VA-TRaC is used for identification and verification of illegal catch operations performed by Norwegian fishing vessels. The system uses automatic methods to identify possible catch operations based on the vessel’s trajectory, whose results are presented to an analyst through a web-based interface of multiple visualization views. The analyst can use these views to explore the results, verify the correctness of the automatic methods based on the analysts domain knowledge, and modify parameters of the automatic methods. The thesis discusses various aspects of the development of VA-TRaC, including its design, implementation, workflows, and how the system was validated.