Most transport providers throughout Europe are offering a significant amount of information to the public, such as timetables, delays, location of vehicles, maps. There are many transport bodies that already met some of these requirements, e.g., transit agencies providing GTFS data, offering Open Data portals and services for static (e.g., transport lines) and dynamic (e.g., bus real-time location) information. However, these providers are not the only ones that are publishing Open Data on the transport domain; public administrations and individuals are also doing so, either into general purpose Open Data portals.
Many new opportunities can be built on top of this information set. Some of the driving forces will be:
- Economic drivers
The data may support new business models and requirements to deploy sustainable solutions that will be operated and further evolving far beyond the project duration. - Socio-environmental drivers
Traveling safety in sparsely populated areas or overstepping emission values will be addressed with early warning services . Such services will be useful when supporting environmentally conscious traveling options - Technical drivers
Creating smart maps and other decision based tools built on top of data harvested from IoT devices, intelligent vehicles, ITS stations and wisdom of the moving crowd monitoring motion based on passive detection of nomadic devices. - Legislative drivers
Existing and emerging regulatory requirements and incentives
Yet, the fact that these data are publicly accessible does not necessarily mean they are open or useful. Such information should also be usable and shareable by anyone and its license should be explicitly stated in order to allow its commercial use.
These barriers represents challenges that needs to be adressed:
- Lack of standardisation and data interoperability
Connected ITS assets should not need to be replaced or substantially upgraded.
Preserving standards and communication protocols used in ITS infrastructures show reflecting the specifications on data formats that the travel service operators (or their system integrators) are familiar with even if their systems are not fully compliant to them. - Lack of cooperation among mobility stakeholders
Each member of the interoperability platform need to establish working partnerships only with the nearby transportation operators that he/she knows well with an ability to control the scope of his/her collaboration with each operator separately. Thus, he/she can get connected to large-scale mobility ecosystem without being forced to accept disadvantageous conditions.
bottom-up management of collaboration among mobility service operators where actors can set the conditions for themselves in their favour (e.g. actors can control with whom they wish to share the access to a specific ITS asset or data field upon mutual confirmations). - Financial barriers
Transportation service providers can keep the ICT systems they have deployed (even the proprietary ones). They just need to take the open samples of CrossMove adapters to develop own ones and to integrate to the open interoperability gateway. Thus they gain large-scale intermodal extensions of their ICT systems at moderate investments. - Lack of information
Extraction of traveling information from heterogeneous sources can be difficult as they are provided in different formats (web pages, pdf and word files). Ownership and accessability of the extracted data should ideally be offered as part of public domain/open data. - (Unsatisfactory) transportation infrastructure
Real time and historical information about critical locations (bottlenecks) for certain traveling modalities would assist the local authorities to identify and prioritise their investments into the local infrastructure by maximising the impact of those investments.
The need for smart-map algorithms could be used to assist the most ambient routes for specific modalities even if the particular infrastructures are underdeveloped at the given location. - Security & Privacy concerns
Who are allowed to acceess or fully control the access to their data. Metadata is the only information that should be available on connected infrastructures (e.g. there is an evidence on the set of ITS assets connected by a user but no direct access to the data from that ITS asset.).
A peer-to-peer concept that organically supports the end-to-end encryption of communication links between the ICT systems of the platform members is an example of a method that would serve the purpose of providing information without releasing person- or vehicle specific data..