General Innovation 1: FREEDATA
Leaders:
WP1: Pirkko Saarikivi, Lulu Hyvätti (Foreca)
Description:
Free geospatial and weather data.
WP2 question:
To proceed with WP2 task 2.2 "New types of data needs" please determine the data requirements for your 'idea' untill August, 22!
Marcus Wigan: observation
There is increasing interest in many business and innovation communities in making raw weather and other data free at the end point to the end user. Obe way of handling this in Road Idea is to consider doing a business case demonstrating the utility of the EC adopting this approach. If this seems unlikely, the Free Our Data (geospatial community movement in the UK against the Ordnance Survey's controls and pricing and IP management), and a current Upper House Inquiry in Victoria Au where i live are both examples where the OECD evaluations of this as an economic benefit to the overall community and to innovations in particular are widely cited.
It is therefore worth looking at the impact and viability of services that add value to some level of base information being made fee at the end point(even if the EC pays for its production to those creating it)
Destia will have constructive views on this, but it is worth taking further as it is NOT a 'blue sky' proposal (the US Dept of Commerce continues to regard it as a competitive advantage for the USA)
Free Data
The idea
Free Data is the first and according the seminar participants, most popular of the three general ideas that were short-listed for further study after the First ROADIDEA Innovations Seminar. This idea is not suggesting a new service as such, but a new general data policy that would affect many present and coming transport services in Europe. In principle, Free Data indicates that key data sources for transport services - i.e. weather ob-servations and models, road weather observations and models, traffic volume data, car measurements and other geospatial data - should be accessible and available free of charge (or with minimum copying costs) and in a convenient manner for any service provider for further utilisation. These various data sources may be from public or private sources. In the following, these both alternatives are considered.
In the US and Japan, open and unrestricted data policy is a part of everyday life, resulting in very fast product development and much wider variety of information services and number of companies providing the services. In Europe, investments in production of Public Sector Information (PSI) are about half of what they are in the US, but the economic value using this information is only 20% compared to the US market. Several studies have indicated that the restrictive data policy in Europe is the main barrier and reason for this huge gap. European Commission has reacted to this fact by developing several Directives, which in theory support open data policy. Directive on the public access to Environmental information (1990, revised 2003), Directive on the re-use of Public Sector Information (2002, just now under revision), and the INSPIRE Directive (2006) are examples of Directives giving legal guidelines on the re-use of e.g. weather information.
However, in practice nothing much has happened. Weather information is still in most EU countries very expensive and for small SME weather service providers a strong barrier to entry to the market. Road weather information is in some countries (like in Finland) available free of charge, but in most countries it is governed by several public or private bodies and completely inaccessible. Map information is also still very expensive in Europe, though recently due to the American sources such as Google, free alternatives are now available and useful in some applications. There are also many private data sources that would be very useful in developing new services, but that cannot be accessed even if one is willing to pay. Good examples are CAN-BUS output which various car manufacturers still keep as their confidential asset, and available to their own customers only.
The availability and pricing of other transport information varies considerable from country to country and in all cases requires contacts and contracts with the source. There is now centralised transport information server or portal in Europe. Compare with
Clarus-initiative in the US: free web-based server for all road weather information! see
http://www.clarusinitiative.org, integrated surface transportation weather observing, forecasting and data management system.
Technical approach
The data that is needed and that is useful in service innovations is the same, whether free or with a price. Thus the first step is to achieve the decrease in data prices through the advent of open data policy in all EU countries. There are some positive signs and decisions in some of the countries (the Netherlands, the UK, Spain and the non-EU country Norway), but the progress has been extremely slow in the past decade. In the new East-European EU countries, the effect to the overall situation has been unfortunately very negative.
But nevertheless, let us be optimistic. Sometimes in the future, Europe will also adopt open and unrestricted data policy. Transport service developers can afford to use several data sources and combine data in new innovative ways, and integrate new data to their existing services. Second major step will be implementing a European-wide data server for easy and efficient access to data. With present web technologies, it is a trivial task technically, but major effort politically and administratively. Here a concerted action from the European Commission is definitively needed.
Geographical scope
Free Data covers all geographical scales and entire Europe. Hopefully also the surrounding countries gradually adopt open data policy, such as in the US and Japan today, to allow global service solutions.
Data Needs
Free Data concept covers all data that is nowadays used and that will be used in the future. Realistically, some data, e.g. from private sources, may still have a price tag and licensing conditions. However, the necessary combination of reliable and comprehensive data set for a transport data provide should be available for a reasonable price, just like the PSI Directive already indicates.
DISSEMINATION INTERACTIONS
The price of data is a key factor determining the viability of many of the ideas and innovations with which ROADIDEA is concerned, and a lower or marginal cost woudl make may more realisable. This factor, price of data, needs to be part of the projection of the findings of ROADIDEA in the dissemination phase, as the cumulative impact of data pricing and the role in innovations support in opening it up, will then be apparent. Consequently FREEDATA is an underpinning for the Business Model evaluation stages.