On 3 and 4 November, NAPCORE held the first edition of its Mobility Data Days. Paris was the chosen city to gather NAPCORE members and other representatives from the ITS community to discuss the project’s process to date and collaboratively define the upcoming steps to ensure its success. TN-ITS presented its active role in the path towards a seamless European mobility experience by organising and participating in some of the sessions.
In April 2021, the EU-funded project NAPCORE kicked off with the ambitious goal of establishing harmonised and federated National Access Point (NAP) infrastructure in any EU and associated Member State. TN-ITS is an active NAPCORE member, sharing its standard and contributing to the exchange of authoritative static road data, in consistency and harmonization with other standards while leveraging NAPCORE’s reach to expand its presence in the European Mobility Data ecosystem.
‘NAPCORE provides us the means to further mature and develop the TN-ITS standard to serve advanced services like automation and ISA (intelligent speed adaptation), as a logical step to further improve the established services in 13 Member State Road Authorities. NAPCORE also creates the visibility and the great opportunity to reach more Member States and their cities’, claimed Frank Daems, senior manager at ERTICO.
On 4 November, the second day of the Paris’ Mobility Data Days, Mr Daems organised the session ‘Map related Data Exchange (TN-ITS), to present the TN-ITS platform’s role within NAPCORE and how to enhance its scope. During the discussion, he introduced an overview of the TN-ITS evolving data chain by exposing mechanisms like the ‘ feedback loop’ and its capacity to enhance the NAPs’ related data quality Road safety represents one of TN-ITS’ core concerns. The session revolved around its recent contribution to the ISA-FIT project, Helmond, The Netherlands (https://tn-its.eu/eu-projects/), as a concrete case how cities can realise faultless implementation of Intelligent Speed Assistance (ISA) systems. Parking was also discussed as a priority application for the platform.
Our role now is to continue growing our community, involving more representatives from public authorities, service and data providers, and map makers. There is plenty of data available, and our platform has an undisputed potential to, working together with NAPCORE, provide the tools to retrieve this information and contribute to harmonising the NAPs for a seamless European mobility experience.
NAPCORE project activities are a first step, focusing on the accessibility of data, while TN-ITS is addressing the topic of data availability, in a second step. Topics like data trust, maintaining sovereignty, ensuring data integrity, identifying data quality levels, are at the heart of current research and deployment. In parallel, great attention is given to aligning the TN-ITS standard with DATEX II , Public transport data, and meta data standards to insure consistency, complementarity and interoperability of NAP’s authoritative data feeds.