API - Feature request

[Ben Carr]

Hello All,

I'd just like to say what a great service this is, but would there be any easy way to request vessel data by the vessel name rather than the MMSI?

Thanks & Kind Regards

[Heikki Hannikainen]

Hi,

On Fri, 20 Nov 2015, Ben Carr wrote:

> I'd just like to say what a great service this is, but would there be
> any easy way to request vessel data by the vessel name rather than the
> MMSI?

Could you explain your use case, what sort of use would you be planning
for such an API?

- Hessu

[Ben Carr]

Hello Heikki,

Sorry for the delay in responding,

i'm making a software application (free use & bespoke) for one of our customers that displays the location of all of their containers currently on the water. My web-app would probably need to access your API once per day to retrieve the lon/lat of 10-15 vessels, by vessel name rather than MMSI. i believe your limit is 20 per API call when using the MMSI, which would mean it would most likely be 1 API call per day. Maybe 2 max.. .

I work for a logistics company and just code on the side for fun. I just wanted to offer it as a neat feature for one of our customers, the software is being offered 100% free.

Look forward to your response.

Kind Regards
Ben Carr

[Heikki Hannikainen]

Hi,

The API only supports looking up by the unique primary key (MMSI in the
case of AIS vessels), which makes the lookups fast. Vessel names are not
unique, there's sometimes a shipload of vessels having the same name.
There's no search functionality in the API using the non-unique names.

In case your customer has 10-15 vessels to look up, they should certainly
specify the MMSIs, if they want the correct boats to come up in the
lookup.

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- Hessu