MarinePlan

Boat Navigation APIs

For business owners who would like to offer their customers a rich navigation experience, being on the web or from a mobile app, MarinePlan offers a fast and reliable API portfolio.

We offer these APIs:

  • Boat routing: a versatile interface, offering hundreds of different parameters, filters, suppression flags and boat dimensions;
  • Snap to waterway: a service that will give th nearest waterway for a certain kind of ship;
  • Nautical Search: a search engine tailored to nautical objects, aware of translated names and nautical points of interest;
  • Nautical Map Tiles: a simple tile interface (slippy maps);
  • Nautical Maps: a renderer that outputs PNG and SVG in any size, with extra overlaying features such as OpenStreetMap and OpenSeaMap;
  • Nautical Reverse Geocoding: translating a coordinate to a structured plus human readable text format;
  • OpenShipData ship location and meta data.

All APIs use:

  • HTTP/S;
  • JSON output (except maps and tiles);
  • SI units;
  • coordinates in WGS84 as latitude,longitude pairs;
  • a unique API key, issued by MarinePlan.

HTTP Headers

  • The API allows CORS requests by sending the header “Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *”.
  • All JSON responses are sending the header “Content-Type: application/json; charset=utf-8”.
  • PNG reponses are sending the header “Content-Type: image/png” as well as an ETag header.

HTTP Responses

  • Successful requests are completed with a HTTP 200 response.
  • Unknown endpoints report a HTTP 404 response.
  • In case something is wrong with the access, a HTTP 403 is returned.
  • Invalid requests (out of range errors, missing parameters, wrong values, out of range values etc.) return a HTTP 400 response.
  • Unexpected internal errors respond with HTTP 500 responses (this should never happen).

Cost for the API usage

All requests to the APIs are treated as transactions, billed per month, where:

  • 10 map tiles is 1 transaction.
  • 1 static map request is 1 transaction.
  • 1 search action is 1 transaction.
  • 10 map match, or reverse geocoding action is 1 transaction.
  • 1 planned route is 1 transaction, each via point is another transaction.
  • queries for boat locations in OpenShipData 1 transaction per request.

The billed price is per 1000 transactions and there is a minimum number of 20,000 transactions per month. This is the common method for location-based requests in the market. The actual price per 1000 transactions depends on your need and the non-functionals like performance and up-time.

On commercial inquiries, can you answer the following questions, so we can determine the expected cost accordingly?

  • Which APIs are involved (we have routing, maps, tiles, search, reverse geocoding, OpenShipData/boat locations)? Please name all that are important.
  • Is it a mobile app or website?
  • Is is single user use, or a multi-user product?
  • Is the application used to plan ahead or is the app used as a navigation aid in the boat?
  • Is it a paid application (what is the price per year/purchase price approximately)?
  • What would be the maximum load of requests per second (or minute) at 1000 and 10000 users? This is the hardest question, but e.g. on a nice day, with up to N users, doing M actions X and Y every second, etc.
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