
Enabling technologies for Transport Cloud #
Given the heterogeneity and peculiarities of mobility data, and the various constraints related to their safe and trusted sharing, MobiDataLab envisions the usage of an open federated cloud architecture.
WHAT #
In this architecture, complex and often contrasting requirements coming from FAIR (Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, and Reusability) and privacy principles can be enforced easily and practically.
In principle, a federated cloud can support the sharing of arbitrary resources from arbitrary application domains, with arbitrary consumer groups across multiple administrative domains.
A federated architecture would be beneficial for MobiDataLab, given its main objective of fostering the sharing of data amongst transport authorities, operators and other mobility stakeholders operating in Europe which in most of the cases want to maintain the governance of their data.
METHODOLOGY #
MobiDataLab identified the open frameworks and solutions that can provide effective and efficient data-sharing services to stakeholders, and that facilitate their collaboration by supporting secure methods to selectively share and access the data subject to any specific combination of privacy/visibility/trust rules and conditions.
These solutions range from the experiences gathered by various European projects and initiatives on data sharing, to mobility data platforms and technological solutions that are extensively used in the real world and that support the notion of federated cloud. We identified technical and non-technical dimension including governance and regulatory aspects, cloud federation aspects and data aspects. These solutions have been analysed along these aspects in a SWOT analysis to develop a discussion around the relevance of the identified solutions in relation to MobiDataLab’s goals.
We discussed the main approaches with respect to three different categories:
- European projects and initiatives related to Data Sharing, including for example, MyData, GAIA-X, SoBigData++, MobilityData;
- Mobility data sharing frameworks, including, for example Navitia.io, OpenDataSoft, Chordant Convex;
- Cloud-based federated data sharing enabling solutions including, for example, Owncloud and NextCloud.
The results of Year 1 of MOBIDATALAB, addressing the Enabling technologies for Transport Cloud, will soon be available for download on this page.