OpenTransportNet was presented by 21c Managing Partner, Susie Ruston McAleer, to an audience of future city vision and strategy experts at the ITS World Congress in Bordeaux, France on October 8th.
The ITS World Congress and Exhibition is the world’s largest event in intelligent transport systems (ITS) and services. With the theme, “Towards Intelligent Mobility – Better Use of Space,” the Bordeaux Congress focused not only on how achieving intelligent mobility will change our lives, but also on the benefits it can bring to intelligent transport systems applications. Over 11,000 delegates visted the conference and exhibition this year over 4 days.
21c and OTN were proud to to have a conference paper published on the theme ‘Are Open Data and Big Data Transports Silver Bullets?’ with the ability to present its work during an Open Data panel. The Chief Technical Officer of the Transport Systems Catapult, Paul Zanelli, moderated the session with panelists including Martin Minnear from engineering consultancy, Arup aswell as representatives from European cities. During the panel Susie presented the concept of a Smart City being a platform of platforms with open data as the fuel for new service creation. She highlighted a key challenge for European SMEs in accessing Geographic Information/Geospatial data for gaining new knowledge/business intelligence that would benefit their businesses and help them create new services or improve existing ones. Demonstrating the OTN Hubs core capabilities, Susie showed how cities could mitigate this challenge and bring together their open transport data in one central city Hub with a wealth of data visualisation features that could be used by anyone regardless of their technical background. “OTN ensures that geospatial information is no longer purely for the use of large corporates or geospatial experts, it levels the playing field in access to business intelligence from data” said Susie.
After the panel concluded Susie was contacted by a city manager from South Tyrol, as well as data managers from Stockholm looking to share experiences and explore potential areas of collaboration with OTN. Watch this space for further news.