Maritime groups partner on Mississippi River ship reporting

Maritime groups partner on Mississippi River ship reporting    The Maritime Exchange for the Delaware River and Bay and its sister organization, the New Orleans Board of Trade, have signed an agreement to partner in the implementation of the Exchange's Maritime On-Line (MOL) Ship Reporting program at ports along the Mississippi River.
   The Maritime Exchange, which upgraded its Maritime On-Line system last year, entered into a similar partnership in 2002 with Maritime Transportation Exchange in Jacksonville, Fla.
   Ship Reporting, the Maritime Exchange's vessel tracking module of Maritime On-Line, is used by trading partners to monitor ship movements on the Delaware River. The exchange collects vessel traffic data, which is then made available via the Internet and through published reports.
   'Our current ship reporting system is over 15 years old. When we decided to upgrade our database, we looked at a number of programs before picking Maritime On-Line,' said Brett Bourgeois, executive director of the New Orleans Board of Trade.
   While the Maritime Exchange did not originally design its vessel system with the idea of licensing it to sister ship reporting organizations, 'by working together we can pay a proportional share of necessary programming changes,' said Dennis Rochford, president of the Maritime Exchange.