Open transport data for maximising reuse in multimodal route planners

The European Data Portal shows a growing number of governmental organisations opening up transport data. As end users need traffic or transit updates on their day-to-day travels, route planners need access to this government data to make intelligent decisions. Developers however, will not integrate a dataset when the cost for adoption is too high. In this paper, the authors study the internal and technological challenges to publish data from the Department of Transport and Public Works in Flanders for maximum reuse. Using the qualitative Engage STakeholdErs through a systEMatic toolbox (ESTEEM) research approach, they interviewed 27 governmental data owners and organised both an internal workshop as a matchmaking workshop. In these workshops, data interoperability was discussed on four levels: legal, syntactic, semantic and querying. The interviews were summarised in ten challenges to which possible solutions were formulated. The effort needed to reuse existing public datasets today is high, yet they see the first evidence of datasets being reused in a legally and syntactically interoperable way. Publishing data so that it is reusable in an affordable way is still challenging.