Now in its sixth year, those who have participated in prior Beyond Data events in Eindhoven can attest to the remarkable advancements achieved in Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS). By harnessing the collective resources and capabilities of the public and private sectors, we’re successfully moving ITS projects from concept to commercial deployments, and in turn coming that much closer to redefining what it means to create safe, reliable and efficient transportation networks.
Delivering these tremendous advancements in transportation at scale, however, won’t come easy and neither industry nor government can accomplish it alone. Now is the time for all stakeholders to deepen their collaboration and work together on a number of critical topics that will undoubtedly impact regulations, business decisions and the future of mobility.
I believe one of the most important topics to address is the development of the proper technical and legal framework for access to open data. I am proud to be joined by an esteemed group of policy-makers and industry peers at this year’s event for a roundtable on this very topic, including discussion on questions such as:
- What are the fundamental sets of open data needed to implement and scale ITS projects?
- What is the framework to prioritize different sets of open data? We must distinguish between data used to perform safety critical actions (i.e. live road information for autonomous vehicles, safety messages such as black ice or wrong way driver) versus important, but secondary, use cases that improve roadway efficiency (i.e. traffic light synchronization)
- What is the standardized process to access open data across EU countries? If each EU country establishes a single access “open data house,” what are best practices to create uniformed service-level agreements?
Successful ITS deployments represent a giant puzzle, with fragmented pieces of data from different sources that must all be arranged in a particular way. The key to solving this puzzle is to share, analyze and localize the increasing amount of open data being generated by the physical infrastructure.
As a leading location cloud company, HERE is proud to join government agencies around the world on projects that are helping solve this giant puzzle. From the
Netherlands to
Finland to the
state of Colorado in the U.S., HERE is working on cloud-based cooperative-ITS (c-ITS) implementations that utilize the HERE location cloud and platform in combination with mobile network infrastructure. To support standardization efforts by ERTICO, HERE jump-started
an industry-wide initiative last year to discuss a common format for vehicle sensor data and how it is delivered to the cloud.
As my colleague Jane Macfarlane, our chief scientist and head of research at HERE,
will discuss at this year’s event: the significance of big data is not so much the ability to
collect the data itself, the key now is how we
access and
translate all this data.
Headline topics related to data security and privacy are also absolutely critical, and there will be continued debate on how best to safeguard the copious amounts of new information. But at the same time let us embrace our progress in moving ITS projects from concept to deployment, and understand that with progress comes new issues and sets of questions that must be addressed. The opportunity to create interoperable ITS platforms is before us, and the revolution in safe, reliable and efficient transportation networks is not far behind.
More information
HERE is one of the partners of the Beyond Open Data Event and will organize one of the round table sessions at the event about Infrastructure and vehicle derived data for road efficiency and safety. The round table will be hosted by Bernd Fastenrath, Solution Consulting, Digital Transportation at HERE.
Take a look at the program
