Intelligent mobility – the smarter, greener and more efficient movement of people and goods around the world – is a sector predicted to be worth around £900 billion a year by 2025. However, to drive the fledgling sector forward and take a slice of that sizeable pie, businesses must learn to do one important thing: share data.
In March, the Transport Systems Catapult (TSC) – one of several government-backed innovation centres – released a report into intelligent mobility that stressed the UK must move “much faster in plugging various ‘open data’ gaps, if the country is to realise its ambitions of being a global leader in the emerging intelligent mobility market”. Not one to ignore its own advice, the TSC has since launched its online IM Data Index, which catalogues more than 200 sources of information across all modes of transport.
Andy Mason, project lead on the IM Data Index, says the establishment of the catalogue is a useful first step to providing an overview of the travel data available. TSC envisages the index will be a time-saving tool for anyone wishing to use various transport datasets to develop their own applications, such as journey-planner smartphone apps or other software, easing the challenges of linking transport systems to create interconnected journeys.
The IM Data Index contains links to information from sources such as the Department for Transport, National Rail Enquiries, Transport for London (TfL), car parking data and charging data for electric vehicles. The sources are aggregated into nine categories, which include: freight connections “relating to the movement of goods by road, rail, sea and air”; disruption and events; places and spaces, with Ordnance Survey, Google Maps and OpenStreetMap database links; and data on environmental trends and natural occurrences and consumption and transaction, which looks at individual preferences and retail choices related to transport.
Not only is this information useful for businesses and technology developers, but it allows TSC to identify what datasets are missing, or information that does exist but might need opening up or expanding, says Mason.
A total of 19 datasets will likely drive the emergence of intelligent mobility, according to the recent TSC report, The Transport Data Revolution. These datasets include map data; weather; personal location data; network disruptions; planned events; realtime network capacity for people, vehicles and goods; and public transport schedules. Within these core datasets, the TSC identified 11 “obvious transport-related data gaps which could be filled with varying degrees of effort”.
In some cases, such as on-street parking bay availability, these datasets do not exist at all. In others, such as automated cycle count, urban traffic management and control traffic flow data, the data exists in silos. Meanwhile, other data, such as that for historic passenger ticketing, is either not open or simply not available in the UK.
In an additional challenge to filling in the data gaps, much of the information is localised – for example, in databases held by local authorities or private companies. In almost all cases, the technical challenges to making this data available are secondary to data owners’ “attitudes, costs of establishing and maintaining sensor networks, in-house skills needed to support data sharing, and data privacy concerns”, says the report.
Convincing firms of the benefits of sharing data will be a large part of Mason’s team’s work, he says. He points to TfL as a good example of the business growth that can come from sharing travel data. “It has opened up a lot of its data and created a platform for external people to go and innovate off their data and enrich their services,” he says. “There is a feedback loop, as if people have more information they are more likely to use its services. It also enables people to come up with ideas that organisations have not thought of as related to their data – it’s useful to get a fresh viewpoint on that.”
So far, it has mostly been travel app developers that have been making the most of open-source travel data, giving passengers access to live travel information and helping them make more informed decisions about their journeys.
However, further down the line, this data will be used for autonomous cars, which will need to communicate with other vehicles and forms of transport to create smooth, interlinked end-to-end journeys, says Mason.
For example, taxi firms could access live train scheduling and passenger load information provided by the railway operator, as well as personal passenger travel information, to schedule the number of autonomous vehicles to pick passengers up at the station when a train arrives. “All the interlinking parts of this network need to be able to communicate automatically. That’s where the data and standardisation of data formats come into play,” he says.
Private firms and the public sector all store useful travel information in various kinds of data formats, which throws up obstacles for the instant machine-to-machine communication that is key to the future of intelligent mobility.
In particular, the public sector, which produces a lot of open travel data, uses non-machine readable formats such as CS3 and XML, says Mason. “We want to espouse the standardisation of data formats, which is difficult across various public sector bodies, and with private firms pushing their own formatting options. This job will be advocacy of opening up data and giving people advice on the best ways of formatting information.”
There is a movement towards linked open data, backed by the Open Data Institute, which enables various different machines to seamlessly communicate. The TSC is also doing its own research into the internet of things and machine-readable data formats, such as HyperCat, which it is looking to advocate and develop.
Data linkage is going to be a complicated issue to resolve. Large, private software developers that are in the business of collecting data, as well as government bodies, want to push their own standards, says Mason. “How you legislate it to use only one specific data format, I don’t know. I think time will tell, possibly a bit like the VHS/Betamax videotape formats – one will become an eventual leader.” He hopes that an open-source, as opposed to a proprietary, data format will be named champion.
Over the next few months, the TSC will begin to transform the IM Data Index into a data platform, hosting its own data along with the current links it provides to data sources. It also plans to host other people’s data, and potentially develop a ‘marketplace’ where businesses can advertise their data and share or trade valuable data sources. “This project is the first step on the road. It’s all building up to the eventual goal of having the transport sector all seamlessly interlinked, and data will play a huge part in that,” says Mason.
“It won’t happen overnight, but I think we’re moving towards this in the next five to 10 years. If you’re left out of that, and sit there and keep all this data to yourself, you’re going to be left out in the cold.”