When is maritime open data strong enough to support a decision?

The question

What can a maritime assessment legitimately establish when some sources describe static context, some provide live observations, and some are stale, incomplete, or unavailable?

Why it matters

An authoritative-looking dashboard can collapse background knowledge, current observations, and model inference into a single score. That creates false precision. Strategic users need to see which evidence supports which claim and when the system should abstain.

What we would need to know

• Assign each source a role: static context, live observation, corroboration, or model input.
• Record retrieval time, observation time, coverage, transformations, and missing fields.
• Keep source disagreement visible and define thresholds for insufficient evidence.
• Reproduce the score from preserved inputs and state which conclusions the evidence cannot support.

What the answer could change

An answer would affect alert design, executive reporting, and whether a user should act, check another source, or wait.

Where the question comes from

This question is informed by the public MarineAware research demonstrator and its Bab el-Mandeb evidence audit, created by Dipankar Sarkar.