The UK government is set to revamp its Transport Data strategy to allow professional and hobbyist developers to create new apps by opening up a large catalogue of data. The Department for Transport (DfT) has set out plans to develop a centralised marketplace for transport data, bringing together open data from across the transport sector to improve sector-wide innovation. The aim is to lower the costs associated with data collection and allow innovators, such as app developers, access to data that has previously been siloed.
The new data catalogue, known as Find Transport Data, will provide tech firms and local authorities with a single point of access for transport metadata to improve discoverability of data and enable more detailed travel analytics. Previously, such data has not been available to the masses and the department has cited a lack of access to data during the pandemic as a key problem that has hindered innovation within the sector.
The DfT believes data sharing unlocks value across sectors and Find Transport Data will allow companies to make innovative use of transport data in ways that would have been costly and time-consuming previously. The strategy will also bring together data across more modes of transport, with a number of potential benefits arising from this.
