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OTN Moves Up A Gear After Riga Meeting


On 19 May 2016 OpenTransportNet team gathered in Riga for a two-day meeting to discuss recent progress and agree on future steps. The meeting was hosted by Exigen, OTN partner specialising in software development, and was attended by representatives of all companies and organisations making up the consortium. Present at the meeting was also one representative from Ghent, a Belgian city that is going to adopt OTN solution and set up its own instance of the Hub in the coming months.

The meeting kicked off with a review of deliverables and assessors’ feedback on the progress in Y2. IS-Practice, a partner in charge of project management, then went through the KPIs before giving the floor to Aneta Rapacz. Aneta summarised responses from the test rounds that were organised by pilots in recent months and discussed with the partners recommendations for Hub improvements that test users said they would like to see on the platform.

Next on the agenda were presentations by Intrasoft and HSRS (technical development status and planning) and Exigen (pilot mobile apps). Intrasoft and Exigen also talked about crowdsourced data and described different ways in which pilots can collect and manage this type of information. The floor was then given to partners from iMinds and University of West Bohemia who described the intricacies of semantic web on the example of three OTN services: Smart Points of Interest, Open Transport Map and Open Land Use Map. Before adjourning for lunch partners had a chance to listen to Thimo Thoeye who represented future OTN adopter, the city of Ghent, at the meeting.

The afternoon session was dedicated to project’s sustainability and was run by Pavel Kogut. Pavel opened the session with a presentation on three business models (open source, freemium and mixed) that OTN could adopt after the final review. The presentation was followed by an exchange of opinions on the strengths and weakness of each and a non-binding vote was held afterwards to see which one enjoyed the highest support among partners. The mixed option was a clear winner.

The second day started with two parallel sessions: one dedicated to pilot activities and planning, another to the technical development of OTN tools and services. Around lunch time both sessions came to a close and partners gathered all together in a room to take stock of main decisions and propose a tentative plan for the coming months. Follow us on social media to be the first to learn about our activities and events.


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