Data.gov Maritime Collection

Marine Transportation - the maritime shelf of the US government's unified data catalog, aggregated across every agency that touches salt water. Roughly 240 maritime-tagged records sit in this corpus, contributed by NOAA's Office of Coast Survey, the Army Corps of Engineers, the Coast Guard, the Maritime Administration, the Bureau of Transportation Statistics, HIFLD, USGS, EPA, OSHA, the National Park Service and state portals. Where a single agency feed gives you one measurement series, this collection hands you the whole reference stack in one sweep.

The mix skews toward geography, infrastructure and administrative lists rather than any single time series: line networks of the inland waterway system, polygon boundaries of US maritime jurisdiction, point inventories of navigation aids and seaport designations, fleet rosters and terminal cargo statistics. Each entry is a DCAT metadata record rather than a bare file dump, which means publisher, cadence, contact point and distribution formats are declared up front instead of reverse-engineered from filenames.

Ask for a sample and we send real rows drawn from these records - not screenshots of rows.

Each row below is a verified catalog entry - title plus named publisher - drawn from the five sample records confirmed during research:

title       : Maritime Limits and Boundaries of United States of America
publisher   : Office of Coast Survey
geometry    : polygon boundaries of US maritime jurisdiction

title       : National Waterway Network Nodes
publisher   : United States Army Corps of Engineers (USACE)
distributions : text/csv | application/vnd.ms-excel | text/plain

title       : Commercial Strategic Seaports
publisher   : U.S. Maritime Administration (MARAD)
geometry    : designated seaport points

title       : US Coast Guard (USCG) Maritime Differential GPS (DGPS) Locations
publisher   : HIFLD
geometry    : station points

title       : Intermodal Freight Facilities Marine Roll-on/Roll-off
publisher   : Bureau of Transportation Statistics (BTS)
geometry    : facility points

Five rows, four publishers, three geometry families. That spread in five consecutive results is the argument for the collection as a whole: sibling records add Marine Highways, MARAD Gateway Offices and Regions, MARAD Centers of Excellence, the US Flag Fleet List (a static January 2022 roster), Navigation Facilities from USACE and the Port Authority of NY/NJ maritime terminal cargo series contributed through a state portal. Individual datasets inside these entries run from a few hundred rows into the millions.

Two layers of schema live here, and it pays to keep them straight. The catalog layer is uniform across all ~240 entries - every DCAT record carries the same descriptive frame, so a pipeline written against it reads new records without modification. The dataset layer varies by contributor: a USACE node table, a Coast Survey boundary polygon set and a BTS facility inventory each bring their own column sets, which is why field-level definitions are rated estimated until the specific records you need are pinned down; per-dataset naming locks when your sample is prepared.

• Geography: the United States and its waters, wall to wall - Atlantic, Gulf, Pacific, Great Lakes and the inland waterway network that feeds them. Some collections extend to international partner datasets, so the frame leaks slightly past the border by design.
• Temporal: deliberately uneven. Static one-off publications such as the US Flag Fleet List dated January 2022 sit beside annually refreshed series, so any cross-record model needs start dates handled explicitly rather than assumed.
• Granularity: dataset-level catalog entries spanning point locations (DGPS stations, gateway offices, seaports), line networks (waterway links and nodes), polygon boundaries (maritime limits) and plain tabular statistics (terminal cargo).

The honest framing: this is a discovery layer over mostly-static federal reference products, not a live measurement feed. Its value is that ~240 agency outputs resolve through one consistent metadata frame instead of sixteen agency websites.

API, files, or your warehouse. Daily, weekly, or hourly.

You pick the channel and the cadence; the catalog frame above travels unchanged across all three. Tabular files suit overnight warehouse loads when you want the whole maritime shelf mirrored locally, structured payloads suit event-driven pipelines that react to new or revised records, and flattened extracts land spreadsheet- and SQL-friendly shapes for analysts who want the inventory without touching a pipeline. Because every record carries the same DCAT descriptive fields regardless of its contributing agency, switching cadence later is a settings conversation, not a re-mapping project.

• Federal-source discovery sprints - consultants scoping a port, waterway or fleet project enumerate the whole maritime corpus in one pass instead of guessing which of a dozen agencies publishes what; the ready-made inventory of about 240 records collapses days of search into an afternoon.
• GIS base-layer assembly - maritime limits, marine highways and waterway network nodes stack directly as jurisdictional and routing frames under any vessel or cargo analysis; the National Waterway Network note covers the join keys.
• Provenance-grade citation - every figure traces to a named agency publisher through the DCAT contact and publisher fields, which is why journalists and academics reach for it when a commercial directory offers nothing citable.
• Fleet and infrastructure screening - the US flag fleet list, strategic seaport designations and Ro-Ro facility inventories answer capability questions before any market-sizing work starts.
• Cross-agency stitching - data-product builders use the uniform catalog frame as the spine for pipelines that pull several agencies' outputs into one warehouse table (builders' workflows).
• Terminal cargo context - the Port Authority of NY/NJ terminal cargo series shows what state-level contributors add on top of the federal core.

Developers & data-product builders rank first: bulk-friendly distributions plus a per-record descriptive frame make ingestion scripts straightforward once the right records are found, and the schema never shifts underneath them mid-project (developers builders use cases). Market researchers & consultants treat the collection as a scoping instrument - a defensible enumeration of what the federal government publishes on ports, waterways and fleets before commissioning primary work (market researchers use cases). Journalists, academics & students get federal provenance on every row, citation-grade attribution included (journalists academics use cases). Data scientists come last but not for nothing: when a project needs several federal sources stitched together, federated search across agencies beats six separate integrations (data scientists use cases).

• EMODnet Vessel Density Maps (EU Waters) - processed monthly vessel-density rasters versus raw American agency artifacts; the head-to-head comparison settles when processed intensity beats a discovery layer.
• NGA World Port Index (Pub 150) - about 3,801 global ports with depths and facility flags; the deeper physical reference once this catalog has told you which federal records exist (World Port Index).
• BTS Maritime Data and Port Performance Freight Statistics - annual top-25 US container ports by TEU plus dwell times; the measured-flow counterpart to this catalog's infrastructure inventories (BTS).
• MarineCadastre AIS Vessel Traffic Data (USCG Nationwide AIS) - tens of billions of position reports for US waters, 2009-2025; no AIS positions live anywhere in the ~240 catalog records, which is exactly why the pairing works.
• Glossary notes - how DCAT metadata structures each record and where waterborne commerce statistics fit alongside them.

Three honesty notes before you request a sample. The ~240 count was derived by paginating the full result set at research time because no exact total is exposed - confirm against delivered rows rather than hard-coding. The tags-only filter path returned unfiltered defaults during testing, so record selection runs on free-text matching until the facet is confirmed. And PSIX (Port State Information eXchange) plus the vessel entries/clearances series did not surface in catalog search this session, so neither should be assumed present. Full slice ranking sits on the marine transportation data hub, with the ranked view at best marine-transportation datasets.