Advancing data standards for advancing public transport: DATA4PT highlights project insights at UITP Summit

From 4 to 7 June, DATA4PT partners and experts headed to Barcelona for the UITP Summit, sharing DATA4PT insights at the world’s largest sustainable mobility event. Through two dedicated sessions and many more interactions and presentations from partners, DATA4PT disseminated knowledge proving that for a seamless door-to-door EU travel ecosystem, we need projects like DATA4PT to support a more open, data-driven sector.

On the Tuesday, the Innovation in the Spotlight session featured a panel discussion on the implementation challenges, lessons learned and added value of using EU data standards by mobility providers. The session hosted guest speakers from the NAPCORE project, the EU CEN body and implementing countries public transport authorities.

During the discussion, the importance of data quality standards was highlighted, also referring to the DATA4PT Validator which was developed for exactly this purpose. Participants agreed that it is very important to have common standards developed in collaboration with the entire sector and stakeholders to ensure data exchange and interoperability between different modes of transport as well as passenger services like integrated ticketing. Therefore, for PTAs and PTOs, DATA4PT and NAPCORE projects have immense importance by providing them the necessary tools and services to ensure data quality, implement EU data standards as well as harmonise multimodal data at National Access Points (NAPs). 

The workshop ‘EU Data Exchange Standards for multimodal transport & implementation strategies’ saw project partners share their experiences in the use of the European standards NeTEx, SIRI and Datex II in sharing this data at the National Access Points (NAP).

During the workshop, panelists explained the reasons why they have chosen NeTex and SIRI and the benefits they are seeing, including opening concurrence in order to improve the provided services, covering operational needs and passenger information systems, and minimising operational costs in the long term.

Among others, the session featured a presentation by António Matos from AMP, who explained how NeTEx is used in the Porto Region.

Fabrizio Arneodo, Chief Information Technology Officer at 5T, reported in the session how CEN and CENELEC standards can be used to facilitate MaaS applications deployment.

Furthermore, DATA4PT consortium partners, Julia Düh (AustriaTech, Austria) and Zuzana Švédová (Transport Research Center, Czech Republic), gave updates on the implementation status of EU data exchange standards. For both member states, DATA4PT has been instrumental in helping PTOs/PTAs in implementing NeTEX by using DATA4PT validation tool. SIRI implementation is ongoing in both countries as well as harmonization of at the NAP level for MMTIS and other delegated acts.

Last but not least, Per Lindblad Johansen, CIO of MOVIA, the largest PTA in Denmark, gave an overview of the MOVIA tender for new Traffic Management System and new standard interfaces, where NeTEX and SIRI are replacing the current NOPTIS interfaces.

Seeing that approximately half of the audience was not very familiar with Netex and Siri, the workshop proved very useful to explore the standards and hear from experts what the benefits are. Furthermore, the event brought in contact many different stakeholders for further exchange of experience.

And there was more DATA4PT at the UITP Summit! Apart from the many discussions with public transport stakeholders on the importance of data for our sector, DATA4PT materials were also available at the UITP stand, where interested parties could find out more about the project.

DATA4PT would like to thank all speakers and participants for their great contributions!

All presentations of the DATA4PT Workshop (7 June) are available here.