Fisheries intelligence, structured for analysts who can’t afford to be wrong.
The most comprehensive fishing vessel registry in the world, normalised into a platform your risk, compliance, and research teams can actually query. Cross-referenced across 200+ official sources.
As of June 2026
Six capability layers, one normalised schema.
Every row is traced to a source. Every historical identity is preserved. What Kanikosen licenses is the reconciliation layer — stable identities, normalised fields, typed relationships — built on top of the public record. Nothing is inferred silently.
Full chronology per vessel — not just the current flag.
Every identity snapshot is preserved: name, flag, IMO, MMSI, IRCS, registry numbers. Full identity history retained across 1.5M+ vessels. Trace reflagging and detect identity laundering.
Owners, operators, and the relationships between them.
~400,000 deduplicated entities linked through typed relationships.
OFAC, EU, UK, IUU lists — reconciled to vessels and entities.
Thousands of vessel and entity level alerts and risk events, automatically updated by the system.
Registrations tracked across public registries and authorised-vessel lists.
ICCAT, IOTC, WCPFC, IATTC, NPFC, CCAMLR, NEAFC, NAFO, SIOFA, GFCM, SEAFO, SPRFMO, CCSBT, FFA, EU CFR, and more — harmonised into one table keyed by identity.
Data normalization and SI units, ready to filter.
GT, GRT, DWT, LOA, beam, draught, main & auxiliary engine power, fish-hold volume, carrying capacity, construction material, year built. FAO-ISSCFG vessel types and fishing gears.
Flag-state risk signals built in.
IUU assessments across flag states (EU yellow/red cards, US NOAA IUU reports) and subsidy profiles, joinable directly to vessel flag.
Everything we know about a single vessel — in one record.
A schematic example of a Kanikosen vessel dossier with every foreign key dereferenced. Identifying fields are placeholders.
Current identity
- Std. name
- [PLACEHOLDER-A]
- Flag
- [CC₁]
- IMO
- 9XXXXXX
- MMSI
- 4XXXXXXXX
- IRCS
- XXXX
- Vessel type
- Longliner
- Primary gear
- LLD · Drifting longlines
- Year built
- 2008
- LOA / GT / DWT
- 54.2 m · 499 GT · 612 t
- Engine power
- 1,320 kW
- Fish-hold vol.
- 420 m³
Ownership chain
Identity history (5)
Alerts & sanctions
One JSON API. Query the fleet, drill into a vessel.
Everything above is exposed through a read-only REST API. Filter 1.5M+ vessels by flag, gear, ownership, registrations, or physical specs — then drill into a single vessel or entity for the fully dereferenced record.
Cross-referenced from the sources that matter.
Sources spanning RFMOs, international and national registries, sanctions feeds, and certification schemes. Every row in Kanikosen is auditable back to the upstream list that published it.
Sources refresh continuously; expert review verifies every batch before publication. Kanikosen’s licence covers the reconciliation layer built on top of these sources; the upstream lists remain their publishers’.
Who Kanikosen is for.
Four workflows where patchy, flat vessel data breaks down — and a normalised registry earns its keep.
Maritime risk & KYC screening
Resolve sanctioned entities to the vessels they actually control — even when the vessel has been reflagged three times under a shell.
- Reconcile OFAC / EU / UK / UN lists to vessels by IMO and to entities by alias
- Detect shell-company ownership patterns via the entity relationship graph
- Join to country IUU assessments and subsidy profiles for flag-state risk
Enrichment for AIS & tracking products
Layer a verified identity, ownership, and regulatory record onto every AIS signal — attribute vessels that tracking feeds alone cannot.
- Join by MMSI · IMO · IRCS to enrich vessel tracks with authoritative identity
- Resolve dark-vessel events against historical identities and MMSI spoofing flags
- Cross-reference RFMO registrations to validate declared fishing authorisation
Government & NGO investigations
Follow beneficial ownership through jurisdictions. Detect flag-hopping. Build evidentiary chains across sources fragmented today.
- Full reflagging history per vessel, timestamped and sourced
- Entity relationship graph — parent, subsidiary, front company, intermediary, operator-for
- Every field sourced, so evidence quality travels with the data
Fisheries science & policy research
Aggregate fleet structure, capacity, and gear composition at a fidelity no public registry currently offers — referenced in peer-reviewed work since 2015.
- Capacity by flag, gear, RFMO — filterable on SI-normalised physical fields
- Longitudinal fleet evolution via the chrono-ordered identity table
- FAO ISSCFG-compliant gear classification with pelagic / demersal tagging
Global scope. Uncommon depth per vessel.
Kanikosen’s scope significantly exceeds official tools such as the FAO Global Record. Field coverage across the 1.5M+ tracked vessels, computed on the current identity of each vessel.
The dark fleet
Most of the world’s fishing vessels carry no IMO number and no MMSI. They are invisible to AIS and to every tracking-based system. Kanikosen holds identities, technical characteristics and historical identity chains for this segment, consolidated from national registries and other official sources, many of them not digitized or not publicly accessible. The coverage table reflects this: identifier coverage is a property of the visible minority of the global fleet, not of the fleet itself. Coverage of the dark fleet is what distinguishes a registry built from official sources from one assembled by observing signals at sea.