The concept of the ARGOMARINE project is the monitoring of the marine traffic and early detection of oil spill events, primarily due to carriers and commercial ships through environmental-sensitive sea areas. This monitoring will be realized by means of sophisticated electronic, geopositioning, and telematic tools connected through a high speed network along with data transmission through suitable data links. Data from different sources will be collected in an independent and remote fashion and sent to a central acquisition and elaboration unit. Motivation and scope of the Argomarine project is the safe detection, notification and intervention toward vessels in emergency situations and the protection of sea and insular environments, endangered by heavy and continuous transport activities, mainly due to intensive ship traffic, generating a consistent pollution risk. The envisaged goal is the necessity for precise and punctual pollution control in areas and shores which are, for instance, of particular naturalistic value, and/or are exposed to risk of accidental or even intentional contamination due to their proximity to industrial or highly densely populated settlements, or crossed by a heavy ship traffic. All the data and the information obtained will be merged and elaborated in a Marine Information System (MIS), i.e. an information system where remote sensing data, field experiment results and estimates from simulation models will be integrated, and tools for data storage and retrieval, data manipulation and analysis,  as well as for presentation, will be available through a common interface.