TRANSPORT DATA MARKETPLACE: AN ANALYSIS OF USER REQUIREMENTS

Transcription

1 10th ITS European Congress, Helsinki, Finland June 2014 Paper Number TRANSPORT DATA MARKETPLACE: AN ANALYSIS OF USER REQUIREMENTS Yanying Li 1 and Jens Peder Kristense 2 1 ERTICO ITS Europe, 326 Avenue Louise, Brussels, Belgium, 1050 Tel: +32 (0) y.li@mail.ertico.com 2 Key Research, Mallinggårdsvej 33, 8340 Malling, Denmark Tel: jpk@keyresearch.dk Abstract The potential benefits of transport data publishing and sharing have been long recognised by transport professionals. There are also transport policies at different levels to encourage data owners to publish their data. However, publishing and consuming of transport data remains as a challenge and there is not yet a platform to facilitate easy data selling and purchasing. The internet has facilitated a blossoming of transacting data. There are many data marketplaces available which are used mainly by developers. This paper studies the existing Google transit data share platform and looks into the feasibility of establishing an online marketplace specifically for transport data. User needs for functionalities of the data marketplace have been studied through stakeholder workshops and questionnaire surveys. Key functionalities of the marketplace have been identified. The marketplace should be able to be a point of discovering and comparing different data sets. The marketplace must be able to indicate quality and scope of data. Data from the marketplace should be ready for use. The marketplace should be able to handle payment of data transaction. Keywords: Transport data, market place, requirements Introduction Transport services are an important issue, which has direct impacts on city or regions economic strength, social inclusion, quality of life and sustainability. Therefore, transport data which are often collected or produced by public organisations (e.g. city councils) or road and transport operators present great values. Due to increasing use of smart phones, the demand for high quality machine-readable and openly licensed transport data allowing for re-use in development of

2 commercial or non-commercial products and services has been rising significantly in the last few years. For example, there are many multimodal journey planer apps which rely on real time data collected from all possible transport modes. Transport data producers or owners (often public entities) have been criticised because they have not yet managed to respond adequately to these new challenges set by society and technology [1]. However, previous research shows that data owners (normally transport operators) are willing to share their data if no additional workload and cost are needed [3]. In the past decade, many efforts into standardisation of data format and interfaces have been made in order to facilitate data sharing. Transport policies at regional, national and European levels also request or encourage transport operators to make their data available to other transport operators and the general public. However, there is a lack of a platform for the data owners to publish their data and for users to find the data they need. The Current Data Market A marketplace provides an economic model for broad access to data that would otherwise have proven difficult to either publish or consume. Currently, there are some online marketplaces to facilitate data transaction. A notable data marketplace is Windows Azure marketplace (www. datamarket.azume.com). At such general marketplaces, there are many different types of transport data for sale, particularly data related to public transport data, e.g. bus timetables, bus location etc., as shown in Figure 1. For example, Great Britain Bus Stop Location is a data set available at Windows Azure Marketplace. The data set is sold by number of transactions per month. A customer of the marketplace can export the data to any of the listed formats or directly to Excel or Tableau for application development, analysis or visualisation. 2

3 Figure 1.. Some transport related data at Windows Azure Marketplace However, the general approach behind such market places is to go for a broad horizontal range of data, rather than to specialise. Such data marketplaces only have a general Search function rather than specific data catalogues, resulting in difficulties to know what kind of data is available. The Needs for a Transport Data Marketplace A marketplace needs both demand and supply. Most of the consumers of data from today s marketplaces are developers [3]. An example to show the demand is that all public transport data in Helsinki is published to the public. Publishing the public transport data in Helsinki boosts the huge market of apps for journey planners. Just in Google app stores, there are more than 30 apps of Helsinki multimodal journey planners available. Cost for such an app ranges from free of charge to A study has shown that the number of apps multiplies exponentially as provider increasingly open their data, as shown in Figure 2. Figure 2 Multiplication of mobile apps in case of open data [4] The number of available apps using such data demonstrates that there is a big demand for transport data. As soon as such data is available, app developers will use them to develop different apps which can help travellers for better plan their trips and also helps economics move. Such apps have potentials to increase usage of public transport, thus increasing incomes of public transport companies and reducing carbon footprint. Such apps can also make journeys well informed and more pleasant, thus having potentials to increase quality of life of individual citizens. Case Study: The Google Transit Data Feed Current Google Transit Data Feed allows public transport agencies to publish their data and developers to write applications that consume that data in an interoperable way. The initial idea to set up such a system is that public transport operators are experts at 3

4 running the transport networks but these agencies might have less expertise in writing apps for the latest smart-phone. Software developers are experts at development of innovative application but these developers have no access to data. There are many ways for a public transport agency to create a feed. There are tools to help an agency to validate and test its feed. Currently the list of publicly-accessible transit data has 726 agencies as show in Figure 3. Figure 3 List of Agencies in Google Transit Data Feed Specifications to define data forms were created. There are two primary specifications: GTFS: The General Transit Data Feed Specification can be used to exchange static public transport data including agency information, stops, routes, trips, stop-times, calendars, fare rules, frequency and transfer. GTFS realtime: An extension to GTFS, this specification can be used to exchange real time public transport data including: Trip updates: delays, cancellations, changed routes; Service alerts: stop moved, unforeseen events affecting a station, route or the entire network; Vehicle positions: latitude and longitude of a vehicle in the network, speed and odometer reading from the vehicle Static data can be published in txt format. Real time data feeds are served via HTTP and updated frequently. The file itself is a regular binary file, so any type of web server can host and serve the file 4

5 (other transfer protocols might be used as well). Alternatively, web application servers could also be used which as a response to a valid HTTP GET request will return the feed. There are no constraints on the frequency or on the exact method of how the feed should be updated or retrieved. The specifications are updated upon requests. There are fora to suggest changes and additions to the specifications. Users of Google Transit Data Feed however can only make suggestions. Google is the only one who will decide any changes or additions to the specifications. In another word, influences of users on specifications are rather limited. Key functionalities of a transport data marketplace A study has been conducted to identify users needs for functionalities of a transport data marketplace. The study consisted of two workshops and an online questionnaire survey. The survey subjects included some major traveller information providers in Europe, transport operators and transport policy makers in different European countries and researchers [5]. The survey however was unable to reach many individual app developers. Key functionalities of a transport data marketplace can be summarised below. Directory The marketplace should be a point of discovering and comparing different type of transport data. A data directory should give an overview of current available data in the marketplace. The directory should be catalogued into different type of data, such as public transport data, parking data etc. Since transport data often is location related the directory may also be catalogued into different cities and regions. The data directory may be organized by type of location or by type of data as shown below: Traffic data in different cities/regions Different type of mobility data Public transport data Public Public transport data in City A City A transport data Traffic light info Public transport data from Country A Public transport data Agency X in City B from Agency X Public transport data from City B Public transport data Agency Y in City C from Agency Y Traffic light City A info Average traffic speed Average City B traffic speed City C Average traffic speed Country B City C Insurance City C offer Insurance offer 5

6 In addition to the directory, search functions are needed. Quality and scope of data The marketplace must indicate quality and scope of each data set. The marketplace must have a framework to ensure quality of data at the marketplace. The marketplace should be able to verify each data set. Ready for use The data on the marketplace should be ready for use. This can be done either through pre-defined data formats, i.e. a data owner can only supply data in a certain format or through interfaces of the marketplace to clean and re-format the data, i.e. a data owner can supply any formats of data and the marketplace will clean the data set. Payment The marketplace should indicate cost of each data set and provide clearance of payment without individual contracts between data vendors and consumers. The payment must be secure. Potential business models and open issues It is no doubt that there is a need for a transport data marketplace. Establishing and maintaining such a marketplace to make it commercially successful is challenging. A transport data marketplace should cover a wider range of data than just public transport data even though public transport data is a key type of data. Since Google Transit Data Feed has established its importance any new transport marketplaces must take into account Google s influence and may avoid competition with Google. Since most data owners (e.g. public transport agencies) have no financial resources to publish their data, it is unrealistic to charge data publishers. To charge data buyers and to share revenue of data selling with data publisher can be a good business model. However, since Google offers use of Google Transit Data free-of-charge, it is unrealistic to charge usage of public transport data. Moreover, it may limit usage of the data, thus reducing number of data owners to publish their data at the marketplace. There are also other issues such as who should verify data quality, who should who should be responsible for updating specifications, who should provide technical supports to data owners and data buyers, etc. Acknowledgement This study is a part of the MOBiNET project, which is partly funded by the EC through FP7. The authors would like to thank all the MOBiNET project consortium members for their contributions to this study. 6

7 References 1. epsi platform (2012), Open Transport Data Manifesto, available at 2. Sloth M and Christensen T.W. (2010), Investigation Report, Viajeo project deliverable D2.1, available at 3. Dumbill A. (2012), Data market compared, available at: 4. Accenture report (2012), Beyond the traditional establishing new rules and roles for public transportation, available at: lishing-new-rules-and-roles-for-public-transportation.pdf 5. Pihlajamaa O., Li Y., Cokrlic D. etc, (2013), Use Case Scenarios Selection and Preliminary Requirements, MOBiNET project deliverable D2.1. 7