Showing Live (API) Coordinate Data of Vessels on a XYZ based point grid in Rhino / Grasshopper

Hi There,

I am a 3rd year Architecture Student at the University of Edinburgh. I am currently doing a project - as a part of my design unit "Digital Ecologies" - that investigates vessel traffic in and related to our site "Dalgety Bay" near Inverkeithing in Scotland.

I have the API data for a defined location, which shows the longitude and latitude of each ship within that area, live. The website, www.marinetraffic.com allows me to refresh information for every two minutes.

What I want to do as an initial step is to reflect these changing points on rhino. So i have a plane or rectangular boundary which is the coordinate limits of the API and within points represented as the coordinates of each ship and every two minutes they change if the ships move.

In both cases I also want grasshopper to record the previous points of the ships and automatically create a polyline by joining the dots in chronological order.

Perhaps the second step is to rather than showing exactly where they are in that rectangle, making a square grid and telling grasshopper to reflect these points to the closest intersection of the grid lines.

If I can achieve all these later I will kindly ask assistance for how to create a flexible object which is defined by two sets of points, first being the historical data of their previous routes and second being this live data.

I have attached the file I have been working on in order to achieve the first two.

Thank You,

Best,