This is one of 7 Community Groups established under the BigDataEurope Project, a Coordination and Support Action under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Programme, each one tailored to a specific Societal Challenge. The discussions in this group will be used to design and realise the ICT infrastructure needed to benefit from big data technologies, maximising the opportunities of the latest European RTD developments, including multilingual data harvesting, data analytics, and data visualisation.
This Community Group is specifically interested in the challenge related to smart, green and integrated transport and is led by the ERTICO.
This group will not publish specifications.
Group's public email, repo and wiki activity over time
Note: Community Groups are proposed and run by the community. Although W3C hosts these
conversations, the groups do not necessarily represent the views of the W3C Membership or staff.
Think about what connectivity meant to you in the 1990s, the turn of the millennium, and what it means today.
We re- and re-define connectivity and what it means in everyday life; hinting on major technological advancements in a very short span of time. Not surprisingly transport is one of the pioneering domains.
It’s easy to get used to these changes as they – mostly – make our lives easier. In many European cities it is now part of everyday life to have digitalized minute precise information of when your bus is due to arrive. A decade ago we were lucky if every stop had a legible printed paper with the scheduled timings available.
The Internet of Moving Things sounds quite grand (and it is) but can be explained very simply. A moving thing is anything that moves: anything you wear or carry around: clothes, a phone, tablet, fit bit; or use to get in motion: a car, a bike or a rollerblade. All of these can now be fitted with motion sensors connecting them to a centre and enabling interaction among themselves. A common example is last night’s dinner delivery. On many websites you can now track your meal from kitchen to doorstep every minute, enabled by data provided motion sensors. Zoom out and take a look at the moving street scene today: pedestrians, cyclists, cars and trams all in constant motion can now be mapped out with precision on a digital canvas.
One of the best parts of working on innovation projects is meeting inspiring people who pursue ideas revolutionizing industries in ways that only a few years ago seemed impossible.
What if you could create a precise, real-time map of the traffic on your country’s roads and present it in a way anyone can understand?
Traffic management revolution seems apt.
Make way for the RODOS Transport Systems Development Centre, a platform of professionals from academia, private companies as well as public administration working in applied transport research with a specific focus on road transport monitoring and control. In other words, they make it easier and faster for you and I to get around, in the Czech Republic.
The centre uses three primary data sources: floating car data obtained from three fleets, covering about 5% of the traffic flow; an electronic toll system covering over 1000 km-s of motorways producing over 7 million transaction data every day; and classic detector networks such as radars and cameras. All these are fed into Salomon, a supercomputer that then analyses and interprets the various data and produces information and insight of the nation’s roads.
Over 60 participants attended the webinar organized by BigDataEurope on 11th December assessing the different aspects on needs and requirements identified at the BigDataEurope Workshop for Transport held earlier this fall in Bordeaux.
Dave Marples from Technolution set the scene with an introduction to the business aspects, followed by Seán Gaines (Vicomtech-IK4) who gave an overview on the lessons learnt in terms of data and technology requirements. Finally, Maxime Flament from ERTICO-ITS Europe presented the view of policy.
Click through to read the full summary and view the slides!
The fit bit craze isn’t wearing off, quite the contrary: smart earplugs, earrings, or more conventional watches and glasses are making their way into our daily routines with less resistance by the day. Until recently though, an overwhelming majority of these devices was associated with health and fitness. So what does this have to do with transport? Quite a bit; and a bit more in the years to come.
As much as we like to accessorize ourselves though, we won’t necessarily start wearing a new ring to ease the traffic management centre’s daily hustle. They need to provide us with some value or else it’s doomed to fail. Give us an intermodal itinerary, with alternatives and real-time updates; opportunity to book for carpooling; and of course substitute the ticket on the bus.
BigDataEurope is organizing a second webinar on the societal challenge of Smart, Green and Integrated Transport on 11 December 2015 at 14:00-15:00 (CET).
The webinar sets out to pick up from where we left off at the workshop in Bordeaux in October. After many great presentations and discussions and a very fruitful breakout session we now assess what we have learned.
The webinar will focus on presenting and discussing the needs and requirements of the platform from the viewpoints of Policy, Business, and Technology.
Speakers will include:
Seán Gaines, Vicomtech
Dave Marples, Technolution
Maxime Flament, ERTICO-ITS Europe
In the end, participants will get a chance to pose their questions in a Q&A session.
The final report of the Big Data for Transport workshop held on 7 October 2015 in Bordeaux is now available. The report gives asummary on the sessions and presentations that took place during the workshop, along with a detailed overview of the discussions during the breakout sessions.
We would like to thank all of you who have participated in the workshop and look forward to continuing the conversation
There are heaps of first world problems delivering a stable set of nuisances to us every day. Without doubt, waiting for a delayed bus in early November at a discouraging 8am is one of them.
In today’s mega-connected era it has never been so easy to give in to the temptation to let the world know about our disappointing experience. As we take out our phone in the sprinkling rain we give a short glance around the crowded bus stop and see the fellow passenger (to be-s) are doing the same.
A two-way street with a few bumps
Consumers are eager to raise their voice; they don’t shy away from sharing, demanding, or seeking attention. Transport providers and traffic management centres use the new media primarily to promote, as a mean of customer service or at best as a travel alert system. There is a very visible gap here.
We have to understand that this is a two-way street. Passengers along with TMCs have the opportunity to share real-time traffic information via social media. The issue arises when the passengers themselves are the source of information and the TMC has to decide on whether it is reliable enough to share with the community. Right now, many of these data cannot be regarded as a reliable source and have to be verified with other data sources, like surveys, sensors, pictures and so forth. It’s simply too much of a hassle and in the end many TMCs do not use these data at all.
Over 30 participants attended the first BigDataEurope workshop dedicated to the societal challenge of Smart Green, and Integrated Transport in Bordeaux on 7 October 2015.
The overarching aim of the workshop was to define the requirements necessary for big data management in the intelligent transport domain. The theme itself calls for a variety of topics and the workshop was glad to host speakers from various backgrounds be it policy, industry, research institutions or universities who presented on a wide range of topics ranging from the role of social media in transport, through open logistics and traffic management to data analyses techniques.
The workshop revealed that big data with regard to the transport hold considerable benefits for citizens with new and better services in transport, for society at large with for example a more environmental traffic low, for the public sector with an optimisation of traffic management, and for service providers for whom big data provides an important business opportunity. Big and open data also play an important role in how smart cities deploy and use ICT to enhance their transportation networks. Big data will for example lead to improved multi-source traffic and travel data availability and processing, and to tools to enhance multi-source traffic and travel data fusion for i.e. improved traffic and mobility management.
Over 80 participants attended the first webinar organized by BigDataEurope on the 21 September 10h00-11h00 (CET) to introduce the BigDataEurope project, in particular the domain of Smart, Green, and Integrated Transport.
Simon Scerri from Fraunhofer IAIS started off by giving a brief introduction to the BigDataEurope activities and the Societal Challenge of Transport. Next, Philippe Crist from OECD gave an overview on the conclusions of the International Transport Forum report on Big data and Transport. Finally, Maxime Flament from ERTICO-ITS Europe gave an introduction to the BigDataEurope Transport Workshop held in Bordeaux on 7 October.
The presentations along with the recordings are now available, please see the links below.
