Reference · Living document

Glossary

The vocabulary of fisheries monitoring/control/surveillance and how it lands in e-Boat. Terms here are used consistently in every lesson — if a lesson contradicts this file, the file wins and the lesson gets fixed.

Tags: WORLD general MCS/fisheries practice · LEGAL international law/regulatory instrument · UA Ukraine-specific institution or system · EBOAT e-Boat/ToR-specific term

The core distinction

MCS WORLD: Monitoring, Control and Surveillance — the standard three-pillar framework fisheries authorities use to manage a fishery. Monitoring collects data (catch, position, effort). Control sets the legal terms of harvest (licences, quotas, closed areas). Surveillance verifies compliance with those terms. See FAO Ch.8.
VMS WORLD: Vessel Monitoring System. Shipboard equipment that reports a vessel's position (usually via satellite) at a set interval to a fisheries authority. Historically restricted to government regulators, unlike AIS. A legal obligation as much as a technical feature — carrying a working VMS unit is itself a licence condition in most regimes.
AIS WORLD: Automatic Identification System. A maritime safety/collision-avoidance broadcast, mandatory under IMO rules for larger vessels, that happens to double as a public position feed. Unlike VMS it is not fisheries-specific and (mostly) not encrypted/restricted — which is why public tools like Global Fishing Watch can use it, and why vessels engaged in illegal fishing sometimes turn it off ("going dark") while VMS keeps reporting.
ERS WORLD: Electronic Reporting System — the electronic descendant of the paper catch logbook. Separate obligation from VMS: VMS reports where the vessel is, ERS reports what it caught. A complete system carries both; e-Boat's ToR-side counterpart for the catch/logbook half is e-fish below, not e-Boat itself. Built from a small set of standard messages — see DEP/CAT/EOF below.
DEP / CAT / TRA / POR / EOF WORLD: The core ERS message types marking one moment each in a trip: DEP (departure), CAT (catch, per haul/day), TRA (transhipment at sea), POR (prior notification before landing), EOF (End of Fishing — finalises the trip's logbook; the record is no longer directly editable after this).
Chain of custody WORLD: The documented, unbroken record of who handled a piece of evidence, when, and what was done to it. A violation record that cannot prove it wasn't tampered with loses its evidentiary value regardless of whether tampering actually occurred. Underpins ToR C-066..C-076 (documents/notifications).
RTO / RPO WORLD: Recovery Time Objective (how long the system may be down after a failure) and Recovery Point Objective (how much recent data may be lost). Independent knobs — e-Boat's ≤30min/≤5min split tolerates a longer visible outage than data loss.
Preventive notification WORLD: A notification sent to the vessel/master before a violation occurs, aimed at stopping it — e.g. AFMA/Parks Australia's real-time alert on entering a prohibited marine park. Distinct from a regulator-facing dispatch alert (sent after detection) and a public reporting channel (e.g. NOAA's Enforcement Hotline). Three different audiences, easy to conflate under one word, "notification."
Catch certificate WORLD: A trade/certification document proving a shipment's catch was legally caught, required to accompany fishery imports into the EU. Digitised as the EU's CATCH system (compulsory from January 2026), replacing paper certificates. A different category from an evidentiary document (Lesson 12's chain-of-custody material) — a catch certificate travels with the product to a trading partner; evidentiary material stays with the enforcement case file.
Geofence WORLD/EBOAT: A defined geographic boundary (closed area, quota zone, territorial limit) that a monitored vessel is checked against automatically. Crossing one, when the rules forbid it, is what generates a violation. In e-Boat this is EBoat.GeofenceEvaluator + PostGIS, covered by ToR section 5.1–5.5 (C-009..C-039).

The legal "why"

IUU fishing LEGAL: Illegal, Unreported and Unregulated fishing — three legally distinct failure modes bundled under one acronym. Illegal: fishing in violation of a state's laws or an RFMO's rules. Unreported: fishing that happened but wasn't declared, or was misreported. Unregulated: fishing in areas/for stocks with no applicable conservation rules, or by vessels without nationality. IUU fishing is the problem MCS systems exist to fight — see FAO's IUU hub.
PSMA LEGAL: Port State Measures Agreement (in force 2016) — the first binding international treaty targeting IUU fishing, by letting port states deny port access/landing to vessels suspected of IUU fishing. Complements flag-state monitoring (VMS): PSMA catches a vessel at the dock, VMS catches it at sea.
Flag state LEGAL: The state whose flag a vessel flies and whose law primarily governs it, wherever it is. e-Boat is built for a flag state's own monitoring authority (Ukraine) watching its own registered fleet — this is the flag-state half of MCS, not the port-state (PSMA) half.
RFMO LEGAL: Regional Fisheries Management Organisation — a treaty body that sets conservation/management rules for a shared sea area or stock across multiple flag states (e.g. ICCAT for tuna, GFCM for the Mediterranean/Black Sea). Relevant background for Black Sea context even where e-Boat's ToR scope is purely national.

Ukraine and e-Boat

Держрибагентство / State Agency of Fisheries UA: The Ukrainian state authority responsible for fisheries policy and control — the institutional home for both eFish and, per the ToR, the eventual operator of e-Boat.
eFish UA: Ukraine's Unified State Electronic Fisheries Management System, live since July 2024. Covers permits/authorisations, logbooks, landing declarations and the vessel register — the ERS/licensing half of MCS. e-Boat's README lists it as an external REST consumer: eFish owns the paperwork, e-Boat owns the live map and violation detection.
Monitoring object EBOAT: ToR term (C-009..C-039) for "a thing e-Boat tracks on the map" — in practice, a fishing vessel with a position feed. Chosen deliberately generic in the ToR; worth confirming in a future lesson whether anything other than vessels is ever a monitoring object.
Violation EBOAT: ToR term (C-052..C-065) for a detected breach of a control rule — e.g. a geofence crossing. Has its own catalogue, capture flow and history, distinct from a raw event (C-040..C-051), which is broader (anything notable, not necessarily a breach).
Tracker device EBOAT: ToR term (C-077..C-087) for the physical VMS/AIS unit on a vessel, and its lifecycle (registration, assignment, deactivation) as managed data in e-Boat. The vendor/protocol side (ITrackerAdapter) is intentionally unimplemented in the codebase — the vendor list hasn't been received from the Customer yet.
Trembita UA/EBOAT: Ukraine's national system-interoperability bus (X-Road-based), used for cross-registry data exchange between state systems. It's a subsystem of the Платформа реєстрів / Diia Engine platform — but e-Boat itself is not deployed on that platform (see Платформа реєстрів below). Whether specific e-fish endpoints need Trembita mediation is a per-endpoint decision, open as of this writing.
Платформа реєстрів / Diia Engine UA: The Ukrainian government's shared platform for building and hosting state electronic registries — Keycloak auth, Camunda workflow engine, object storage, Trembita interoperability, officer/citizen portal shells, all provided out of the box to a registry built on it. e-Boat's Customer directed that e-Boat be developed beside this platform, not on it: e-Boat brings its own full stack (own Keycloak, own storage, own portal) and talks to the platform-hosted e-fish modules purely as an external API client. Don't assume e-Boat inherits platform services for free — it doesn't.
ToR EBOAT: Terms of Reference — the tender document (FAO RFP 2025/FEUKR/FEUKR/135170) defining what e-Boat must do. Broken into 172 numbered requirements C-001..C-172, tracked one-to-one as GitLab issues; see docs/compliance/README.md in the repo.