AISdb Documentation is the Markdown source for the AISdb user guides and tutorials, published through GitBook at aisviz.gitbook.io/documentation. This repository holds the documentation pages, the navigation table of contents, and the image assets behind the guides, and it is the companion documentation project to the AISdb library. Content tracks release 1.8.0-alpha. The documentation is developed and maintained by the MAPS Lab at Dalhousie University, continuing work that began under the MERIDIAN initiative.
AISdb is an open-source system for storing, processing, analysing, and visualising Automatic Identification System (AIS) vessel-tracking data, built on SQLite and PostgreSQL with a Rust core and a Python interface. These pages walk a reader from a first install through querying, cleaning, enriching, and modelling AIS trajectories.
The book is organised by the table of contents in SUMMARY.md, which groups the pages into the following areas.
introduction.mdis the landing page, with an overview of AISdb, the research programme, and the team.default-start/covers the first steps, including the quick start, the SQL database, and AIS hardware.tutorials/holds hands-on guides from database loading and querying through cleaning, visualisation, interpolation, vessel metadata, and bathymetric and weather enrichment.machine-learning/covers modelling workflows, including clustering, Kalman filters, sequence models, autoencoders, trajectory embeddings, physics-informed networks, temporal graph networks, and a retrieval-augmented chatbot..gitbook/assets/stores the figures uploaded through the GitBook editor.
GitBook and this repository sync in both directions. Edits made in the GitBook editor arrive here as sync commits on main, and commits pushed here are picked up by GitBook and published. The integration is configured in .gitbook.yaml. Its structure.readme key points GitBook at introduction.md for the published landing page, which leaves this README.md free to describe the repository on GitHub, and its structure.summary key points at SUMMARY.md, which defines the table of contents. A page only appears in the published book after it is listed in SUMMARY.md.
Edit the relevant Markdown file, keep the GitBook front matter and the hint or figure syntax intact, add any new page to SUMMARY.md, and open a pull request against main. Every push and pull request runs the docs QA workflow in .github/workflows/docs-qa.yml, which executes .github/scripts/docs_qa.py and fails on broken internal links, missing assets, unbalanced code fences, editorial drift, and references to retired hosts or repositories. Please confirm that every AISdb call in an example matches the release noted at the top of this file. Questions and larger proposals can go through the MAPS Lab organisation.
- AISdb is the Python package for smart AIS data storage and integration.
- AISdb-lite is a lightweight version of AISdb with spatio-temporal capabilities on PostGIS and TigerData.
- NOAA-Integrator acquires and processes Marine Cadastre AIS data into an AISdb-aligned database.
- AISdb-Tutorials holds hands-on Jupyter notebooks that walk through AISdb, from database loading to bathymetry.
If you use the AISdb documentation in your work, please cite it. Citation metadata lives in CITATION.cff, and the BibTeX entry follows.
@software{AISdbGitBook2026:GSpadon,
author = {Spadon, Gabriel},
title = {AISdb Documentation},
year = {2026},
publisher = {MAPS Lab, Dalhousie University},
url = {https://github.com/MAPS-Lab/AISdb-GitBook},
license = {AGPL-3.0}
}This documentation is distributed under the terms of the GNU Affero General Public License v3.0 (AGPL-3.0). See LICENSE for details. It is maintained by the MAPS Lab at Dalhousie University, in collaboration with the Maritime Risk and Safety (MARS) group, building on earlier work from the MERIDIAN initiative. Reach the maintainers at mapslab@dal.ca.