Advancing data-sharing in public transport: NeTEx Italian profile definition and DATA4PT validation

In January 2020, the Italian Ministry for Infrastructure and Sustainable Mobility joined the DAAT4PT project, as support in the activities around the development of regulations on the provision of EU-wide multimodal travel information services (Delegated Regulation 1926/2017).

Among the most advanced Italian mobility centres, a pilot site was selected to serve as one of the DATA4PT pilot sites. The pilot site is the mobility centre of the Piedmont Region, managed by the in-house company 5T srl.

The pilot consists of gathering public transport data from the public transport operators (PTOs) working in the Piedmont Region (approximately 100), store and validate this data, and make it available to National Access Point using the CEN EU standard NeTEx (Network Timetable Exchange) for the static data.

The first step consisted in enhancing the current Piedmont Region Mobility Control Centre, to produce NeTEx datasets and make those available in a secure way to the NAP. This has been completed in August 2021 and after these implementations, the Control Centre has been renamed I Regional Access Point (RAP).

The second step has been the definition of the Italian NeTEx profile, in other words the identification of the CEN 16614 NeTEx standard structures needed to be included in the profile to address the Italian use cases.

To reach this important goal, a dedicated working group led by Fabrizio Arneodo (DATA4PT expert) has been launched in July 2020, including the most relevant Italian stakeholders coming from private and public sectors.

The work has been completed in October 2021, after a formal validation of the Italian profile performed inside the DATA4PT project, to evaluate the compliance with the CEN standards and with the data exchange logic identified in the project.

A Guidelines document has been also released for developers, where the detailed description of the profile has been described together with technical specification for a good implementation; those are available here.

This work implies several benefits: at Italian level it contributes to the interoperability and the gathering of public transport data to be sent to the NAP MMT; for the DATA4PT project it enables the NAP to communicate public transport data with other Member States, as required by Delegated Regulation 1926/2017.