Sharing open data aids innovation, says report

A ‘closed’ culture where competing businesses refuse to share data will hinder the development of mobility services, warns a new white paper from the TravelSpirit Foundation.

Closed technology data and systems leads to silos of knowledge and information, which will suppress innovation, says the report. “Users are confronted with difficult journey planning, services do not mesh and infrastructure is created without the benefit of the full potential insights that could be unlocked from various information silos.”

The TravelSpirit Foundation is seeking to build a network of transport operators, software developer, businesses, policy makers, planners and activists across the mobility and technology sectors. 

It argues that there is an “essential public benefit” to the sharing of open data. “The open mobility eco-system creates sustainability, efficient services for the user, and a choice of mobility options,” the white paper states.

Transport is a right that needs defending from monopolistic processes that “take transport within the private confines of large organisations”, says TravelSpirit. These organisations do not have a public remit and this may lead to “cities being run for benefit solely of large corporations in key organisational sectors”.

Some public organisations, meanwhile, stifle innovation by attempting to protect themselves “against new entrants”. “There is a legitimate need for encouraging and enabling a wide set of participants, such as car sharing, buses/trams/metros, cycle hire, cycle sharing, remote working and telematics. Long-term innovation will be stifled if new entrants are precluded from entering the market.”

While other industries are already operating an open model, the mobility industry is falling behind, says TravelSpirit. Examples of this are obstacles in providing comprehensive geographic travel information or in opening key datasets such as fares. 

The barriers hindering mobility services are reminiscent of the early days of the mobile phone industry, says the report. “Phones were locked into a single network provider and not interlinked between networks of foreign countries. Since then the industry has transformed itself over the years and in most markets.”

The report also offers the example of Microsoft and Apple documents, which were “stubbornly inaccessible by the other operating system”. This changed once “the value of some degree of openness to users became clear and it is increasingly easy to transfer documents between systems”.

TravelSpirit is seeking partners and funders to pilot the “Open Internet of Mobility for global accessible MaaS”. This framework will enable MaaS providers to “compete in a transparent market that is truly focused on providing individualised customer-centric services to anyone and everyone”. 

http://travelspirit.foundation/category/news