A digital road data infrastructure in the EU by 2012

Creation date: 04 September 2006

The EC-supported EuroRoadS project held its closing workshop “Making EuroRoadS happen” at ERTICO on 27 June 2006. It demonstrated a broad interest in the project’s efforts to establish a European road data infrastructure, and attracted more than 50 participants from 35 organisations within the public and private sector, representing 15 European countries. The aim of the workshop was to demonstrate the project’s major results, share experiences, and to discuss recommendations for the next steps needed to achieve a European road data infrastructure. A proposal to encourage the implementation of the project’s result through the establishment of a EuroRoadS Forum was met with approval from the audience.

A harmonised specification framework

The EuroRoadS project has designed a harmonised specification framework for exchanging European road data and has developed mechanisms to maintain and make such data broadly available. The EuroRoadS vision for the year 2012 is a pan-European, standardised, seamless and quality-assured digital road data infrastructure covering at least 25 European countries.

The project has developed a prototype and carried out tests to show that its specification framework can be implemented in a realistic working platform that supports end-user services. Demonstration activities include the capture and maintenance of speed limit data, data processing and integration, meta-data server and services, and the end-user application “SpeedAdvice”. Practical insights from case studies using the specification framework were presented during the 27 June workshop.

Implementing the project results

The project consortium developed recommendations for a series of implementation and exploitation activities. The implementation plan sets out proposals aimed at supporting road data producers in delivering and exchanging data according to the EuroRoadS specifications. The plan will also support organisations in their work to develop, organise and maintain databases and processes for handling EuroRoadS-compliant road data. The exploitation plan puts forward recommendations to foster the exploitation of road information enabled by the harmonised European road interface and to support a wide use of the European road data infrastructure.

The workshop featured a discussion panel with representatives from the European Commission, CEDR, EuroGeographics and eSafety support. The panel addressed high priority issues for the deployment of EuroRoadS, in particular the need for a concrete business model showing the benefits for both suppliers and users and for further investigation to better clarify the road data suppliers’ requirements.

The workshop demonstrated that there is a broad interest in the EuroRoadS results. The project’s technical approach, which makes use of existing standards, is perceived as a good starting point for the establishment of a European road data infrastructure. However, the future organisational strategies and business solutions still need to be further investigated. There are also some uncertainties related to the outcome of the process with the INSPIRE directive, which effects the implementation and exploitation of EuroRoadS results.

A EuroRoadS Forum

The audience agreed on the importance of insuring continuity in the future management and development of the EuroRoadS results. A Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to create a EuroRoadS Forum was considered as a good starting step.

For more information, please visit the EuroRoadS website.