Seeing is believing: making data more accessible to the public

Having access to large amounts of good quality data is, on its own, not enough if you want the public to understand why a major transport infrastructure project is necessary, say ITO World’s Peter Miller and Dave Ladbrook. Which is why the company has been devoting much of its time lately to how data can best be visualised

Rik Thomas

11 July 2014

Want to know where London’s main bus routes are? The above ‘fence’ map will show you – the higher the fence the more buses pass along that particular road each day

Commercial director Dave Ladbrook

ITO World CEO Peter Miller

Just in case anybody was in any doubt, the era of ‘big data’ is most definitely here, and here to stay. “Eighteen months ago a lot of the data we wanted was either so raw that we needed to put in a lot of work to make sense of the information, or it simply wasn’t released,” says Miller. “But last week we got registration data for buses, for example, from VOSA [the Vehicle and Operator Services Agency], and soon we will be getting real-time feeds from Network...