Digitising data feeds of Belgium ports

This centralised system captures data of all the ports, Antwerp, Zeebrugge and the North Sea Port, in one central system. Data is easily communicated through standardized APIs, user-friendly web interfaces and custom-made mobile applications. One clear-cut source of information, capable of making exact predictions. Whereas users in the past had to make their own estimations based on how they were able to read and interpret the split data of the three different systems as a whole.

Finding common ground

The journey started by analysing the 3 different Port Community Systems to determine a standardised format that can be used for data storage, each port had its own structure to communicate data, so common ground had to be found, the same had to be done for the 9 external reference systems that provide added data.

Receiving the data happens through different channels (API, FTP, CSV, mail, ...) so the first step in the process is to flatten the structure to a standardised format so that it can be handled by our service bus. After processing the data it is available in the database so that it can be exposed to external systems.