ENI Table

The abbreviation ENI stands for European Vessel Identification Number, and refers to the 8 digit number you can find on the sides and the stern of every vessel in Europe. This number will never change, no matter how often a ship changes its owner and / or its name. The ENI will remain the same for the entire lifetime of a vessel. All ENIs have the same structure: The first 3 digits are the country prefix (as you can see in the table below), the last 5 digits are a random serial number.

So you can see, why the ENIs are a matter of interest for this database: During the process of creating the database and filling it with data, I searched a lot of websites which were not all up to date and some contained typographical errors. The ENIs allow me to delete duplicates and false entries. Therefore they are very valuable for quality control.