Multimodal mobility has taken a bigger place in society, which also means more mobility services available for travelers, including for example, cycle and scooter share schemes, car-sharing, and ride-sharing. The discoverability of these services in trip planning applications remains a challenge. Data standardization and interoperability are key to resolving it.
GBFS is the de facto open standard to represent shared mobility services and has supported the recent integration of various shared mobility services in trip planning applications. As part of the European legislation to open and standardize mobility data, NeTEx, the European standard which already covers all forms of scheduled public transport in a uniform format, is widening its scope to new mobility services. Recognizing the crucial importance of real data interoperability for enabling applications that make it easy for travelers to seamlessly find the information they need, Datat4PT and MobilityData are releasing a canonical mapping between GBFS and NeTEx ‘new modes’ and SIRI. The two organizations joined forces as the European support organization for NeTEx for DATA4PT and as the stewarding organization of GBFS for MobilityData.
Consensus between the expert groups
DATA4PT and MobilityData experts worked on this canonical mapping between GBFS and NeTEx as part of the release of NeTEx Part 5. NeTEx, a standard based on Transmodel, the European reference model for Public Transport, provides a modular, uniform format covering a wide range of Public Transport services and has recently been extended to cover new mobility services as well. The goal of the mapping was to ensure that GBFS data elements can be represented in NeTEx alongside the many other data services that NeTEx can describe. The detailed documentation is now made public for the entire mobility community with the purpose of increasing the quality of traveler information.
Experts on both sides also wanted to make their work public and accessible to illustrate their core beliefs: GBFS and NeTEx share a community of stakeholders, are fully interoperable, and provide different and complementary value to society. The same could also be said about NeTEx and GTFS (General Transit Feed Specification).
More info on the Mobility Data website.