The data that we will be using in this tutorial is AIS data from the US Coast Guard. AIS stands for Automatic Identification System and the records correspond to messages being transmitted by transponders on vessels containing information on the location, velocity, status, etc. of a ship.

Even if you are not working with vessel data, but for example with car data, you can still follow the tutorial as the main concepts and steps will be similar.

A collection of zip files with vessel movement data can be found at the website of the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). For this tutorial, it is sufficient if you download a single zip file.

For convenience, you can simply click here to start the download.

While the AIS data is being downloaded, you can already continue with the next part where you start creating the new data set.