Ship Information Systems (SISs) have been one of the main research focuses in ship design and become a multidisciplinary area. With these growing research trends, it is important to consolidate the latest knowledge and information to keep up with the research needs. In this paper, the SIS and its different forms are introduced and discussed. The beginning of this paper discusses the history and evolution of SIS. The next part of this paper focuses on different fields and research areas such as networking technology, information fusion, information decision, message display, ship control in real-time SISs. A Semi-Physical Simulation Platform (SPSIM) designed for SIS research and its running effect through a new Fuzzy-PID fusion algorithm are introduced in this paper then. A brief literature survey and possible future direction concerning each topic is included.