The weilburg painting showing the lisbon entry of 1619 in its historical and pictorial context

This article deals with the splendid panoramic painting depicting the Joyeuse Entrée of King Philipp III (Filipe II de Portugal) in Lisbon in 1619 which the author discovered at Weilburg castle in Germany. The author places the painting in its historical and pictorial context by comparing it to the written reports of the entry and comparable 16th and 17th century views of Lisbon. Apparently, the painting is based on a strictly planned choreography that largely follows the previous entry of Philipp II, and is identical in the painted, engraved and written descriptions of the event published between 1619 and 1622.

Genetic algorithm for shipping route estimation with long-range tracking data : automatic reconstruction of shipping routes based on the historical ship positions for maritime safety applications

Ship tracking systems allow Maritime Organizations that are concerned with the Safety at Sea to obtain information on the current location and route of merchant vessels. Thanks to Space technology in recent years the geographical coverage of the ship tracking platforms has increased significantly, from radar based near-shore traffic monitoring towards a worldwide picture of the maritime traffic situation. The long-range tracking systems currently in operations allow the storage of ship position data over many years: a valuable source of knowledge about the shipping routes between different ocean regions. The outcome of this Master project is a software prototype for the estimation of the most operated shipping route between any two geographical locations. The analysis is based on the historical ship positions acquired with long-range tracking systems. The proposed approach makes use of a Genetic Algorithm applied on a training set of relevant ship positions extracted from the long-term storage tracking database of the European Maritime Safety Agency (EMSA). The analysis of some representative shipping routes is presented and the quality of the results and their operational applications are assessed by a Maritime Safety expert.