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Maritime and vessel data

Ships are named in sanctions programmes, banned from ports and detained by inspectors. The maritime collection brings together the vessels on the registers we hold, with their IMO numbers where published, so a ship can be screened by number as well as by name.

How vessels are modelled

A ship is a Vessel record with its name, other names and, where the publisher gives one, its IMO number in imoNumber. Its listing is a Sanction entity with the register and programme, as for any record. See FollowTheMoney JSON.

The collection also holds companies and other records that carry an IMO number (usually ship owners and managers whose IMO company number is published). The inclusion rule is: the record is a vessel, or its published details contain an IMO number.

How vessels are identified

• IMO number. The strongest identifier: a seven-digit number that stays with a hull for life, through renaming and reflagging. We store it as IMO followed by the digits. In the maritime collection, — of — records have one.
• MMSI, call sign and flag. We do not yet hold these as fields. Where a publisher gives them, they are in the record's notes text (for example Flag: Comoros).
• Ownership. Owner, operator and manager links between vessels and companies are not modelled yet. Some publishers' manager names appear as aliases or notes on the vessel.

The maritime download counts every record with an IMO number; the vessel count on the maritime page and in search counts records typed as vessels. The two definitions give different totals.

Where the vessel data comes from

Known gaps. Several vessel registers we collect are not yet in the maritime collection: the UN Security Council 1718 (DPRK) vessel designations, and the Tokyo, Abuja and Black Sea memorandum detention lists. Vessel designations by other authorities are in the sanctions collection only when their records carry an IMO number. See also the US Coast Guard vessel register in Know your business (reference data, no IMO numbers).

Programmes that reach ships, such as port bans, ship-to-ship transfer prohibitions and service bans, are listed under sanctions programmes.

Screening a vessel through the API

Send the vessel's name and, if you have it, its IMO number to the maritime collection. An IMO match counts as an identifier match and is shown in the result's features.

curl -X POST "https://api.crownintelligence.net/api/match/maritime" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"queries":{"q1":{"schema":"Vessel","properties":{"name":["PELIKAN"],"imoNumber":["IMO6922169"]}}}}'

Accepted properties for a vessel query:

name

Vessel name; up to five values. Required unless an IMO number is given.

imoNumber

IMO number, with or without the IMO prefix (imo is also accepted).

flag

Flag state, treated as a country. Most vessel records hold no country, so a flag rarely changes the result.

Use /api/match/default instead to check a ship against every register, not only the maritime ones. See the matching API.

Maritime download

The collection is published in every bulk format at /downloads/collections/maritime/, for example targets.simple.csv (—), with the IMO number in the identifiers column. See the maritime collection and data formats.

Last updated 2026-10-03