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README.md

+The UK Marine Area extends over some 867,400 km2, an area equivalent to 
+around 3.5 times the UK terrestrial extent. The UK's marine heritage is 
+extraordinarily rich and exciting. Wrecks on the sea bed range in date 
+from the Bronze Age to the World Wars and bear testimony to Britain as an 
+island nation, a destination for trade and conquest, and in past times, 
+the heart of a global empire. Communities along the coast have been shaped 
+by their maritime heritage and monuments and stories recall losses and 
+heroes. Much further back in time, before the Bronze Age, a great deal of 
+what is now the North Sea was dry land, peopled by prehistoric communities 
+who lived in lowland landscapes, some on very different coastlines. The 
+British Isles would have been distant uplands above hills and plains and 
+rivers.
+
+This arc of heritage, stretching over 23,000 years, is represented by an 
+abundance of collections. Charts and maps, documents, images, film, oral 
+histories, sonar surveys, seismic data, bathymetry, archaeological 
+investigations, artefacts and objects, artworks and palaeoenvironmental 
+cores all tell us different things about our marine legacy. But they can't
+easily be brought together. They are dispersed, held in archives, 
+unconnected and inaccessible. 
+
+This matters because it is clear that the story of our seas is of huge 
+interest to the UK public. In 2019 alone, there were 2.9m visits to Royal 
+Museums Greenwich, home of the National Maritime Museum; 1.1m visits to 
+National Museum Royal Navy; 837,000 visits to Merseyside Maritime Museum, 
+and 327,000 visits to HMS Belfast. It is also clear that our exploitation 
+of our seas is increasing dramatically. Windfarms, mining, dredging for 
+aggregates, port expansions, leisure and fishing are all placing tensions 
+on the survival of our heritage. If we are to unlock new stories and 
+manage our past effectively and sustainably, we need to join up all our 
+marine collections and get the most of them.
+
+UNPATH will bring together first class universities, heritage agencies, 
+museums, charitable trusts and marine experts to work out how to join 
+these collections up. It will use Artificial Intelligence to devise new 
+ways of searching across newly linked collections, simulations to help 
+visualise the wrecks and landscapes, and science to help identify wrecks 
+and find out more about the artefacts and objects from them. It will 
+deliver integrated management tools to help protect our most significant 
+heritage. And it will invite the public to help co-design new ways of 
+interacting with the collections and to help enhance them from their own 
+private collections. The methods, code and resources created will be 
+published openly so they can used to shape the future of UK marine 
+heritage.