Dominic Thomas
Global shipping runs on paper-era information systems in a container-era world. Since the early 2020s, I have served — in an unpaid, volunteer capacity — as a U.S. expert representative from the American National Standards Institute (ANSI), leading efforts within the International Organization for Standardization’s Technical Committee 8 (Ships and Marine Technology) to digitize the maritime industry through international standards.
As Project Lead, I authored ISO 24060-1, Ships and marine technology — Ship software logging system for operational technology (2021), and its successor ISO 24060-2, Ships and marine technology — Electronic Service Reports (2024). Both standards address a problem that sounds mundane but is not: how ships log, exchange, and govern operational technology data in a consistent, auditable way across a global industry with no single regulator. Getting there required breaking through logjams that had stalled progress across multiple nations and years — work that earned an Excellence Award from ISO TC8 in 2022, with the committee citing “exceptional expertise in promoting consensus among ISO member experts and multiple liaison organizations.”
The research case for this work goes back further, to a 2020 paper I co-authored with Stephen O’Malley, “The Necessity and History of Standards in Maritime Informatics,” presented at the Americas Conference on the AIS and later developed into a chapter in Maritime Informatics (Springer, 2020) — one of the foundational texts making the case for maritime informatics as an academic field in its own right. My co-author on that chapter is an industry leader working to digitize ports and ships around the world, underscoring a point I make often: journal publication is not the sole measure of research impact I care about. Research needs to change what an industry actually does.
That work has since drawn undergraduate students into the standards process itself — one KSU student used skills from an introductory programming project to help me develop international maritime digitization standards through a directed study — and part of the work is now moving toward adoption within international law, through a proposal before the International Maritime Organization. The 2024 Baltimore bridge collapse is a grim illustration of the stakes: better information systems connecting ships, ports, and infrastructure could plausibly have helped head off that disaster. That is precisely the gap this standards work is trying to close.