The lack of a robust data culture in India’s urban mobility sector acts as a constraint in the development of sound government policies, efficient service delivery and most importantly, innovation from the private sector and start-ups across the country.
Mobility DataSpace is a unified data ecosystem for urban mobility that enables democratic sharing of standardised, high quality urban mobility-related datasets among various stakeholders in the quadruple helix model - Government, citizens, academia, and industry. Further, through sustained dialogue and collaboration with these stakeholders, we hope to incentivise a “culture of data” within urban mobility and allied sectors. Inspired by the DataSmart Cities Strategy and MeitY’s framework for National Open Digital Ecosystems, Mobility DataSpace rests on three key pillars - Data Delivery Platform, Governance and Community. The Data Delivery Platform will act as public digital infrastructure that can share standardised, high quality data, as well as provide additional services based on the available data. Further, the development of comprehensive domain-specific data standards for urban mobility, in line with national guidelines and international best practices, is also a key effort within this pillar. Through the second pillar, Governance, we aim to clearly define the types of data licensing and rules of usage for this platform along with responsibilities and liabilities of various actors within the ecosystem. Finally, the third and most important pillar, Community, will focus on facilitating collaboration and innovation among government organisations, private companies, start-ups, and research institutions. In order to encourage a “culture of data'', we plan on creating an experimental incentive model that helps realise the innate value of high quality data. Over the course of the pilot project we supported data hackathons, open innovation challenges and conducted webinars as a part of the outreach strategy.
DATA DELIVERY PLATFORM
unified digital platform to share high quality standardised data on urban mobility and allied sectors
GOVERNANCE
clearly define the rules of usage for this platform along with responsibilities and liabilities of various actors within the ecosystem.
COMMUNITY
facilitate collaboration and co- creation among government organisations, private companies, start-ups, research institutions
INTEROPERABILITY
Built on Open Source tech stack with Sector-specific Data Standards
CONTROLLED SHARING
Custom Data Licences with IUDX access standards
DOCUMENTATIONS
Open Documentation and Resources
COMPLIANCE
Supports only Non-personal Data for regulatory compliance
The principal instance of DataSpace/Mobility was deployed in the ICCC of Faridabad Smart City Limited. The whole technology stack, including the open source code will be handed over to the SPV along with the initial data phase. The aforementioned phase, process and manages the ATCS static data end-to-end, including the automatic fetchment of data from the ATCS and ICCC, automatic pre-processing, cleaning and optimisation in the pipelines, automated standardisation in the exclusively developed Open Data Standard, attachment of Open Data Licence, and onboarding of data to the DataSpace/Mobility for access as per the City’s preferences. The aggregated and processed data from the ATCS system was on boarded to IUDX and is currently available at the following link: https://catalogue.iudx.org.in/dataset/smartcityfaridabad.co.in-396b84c669a5554a9c10b6fd83070827b50b0049-file.iudx.org.in-faridabad-atcs-static-info
Mentor
Architect and Urban Planner CEPT University, Ahmedabad
Architect, University of Nottingham,England
Data Scientist, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore
By efficiently moving people and goods, the urban transport systems spur economic growth and improve standard of living for all. However, urban transport also has extensive impacts on public health and the environment due to increased air and noise pollution, road traffic accidents, etc. With these concerns in mind, the National Urban Transport Policy (NUTP) set the goal of “moving people, not vehicles” (MoHUA 2014). In order to realise this goal, the document identified several key initiatives to be undertaken in terms of urban transport planning, infrastructure development, traffic management, governance and capacity building.
One such initiative suggested by the NUTP was the development of a central database of urban transport-related information. Such a database would help in formulating sound policies and effectively assessing the impacts of the various initiatives undertaken. Therefore, the Institute of Urban Transport (IUT) was mandated to set up a Knowledge Management Centre (KMC) at the Central level to publish urban transport related data (IUT 2016). However, the application of the information available on the KMC website is limited due to the lack of up-to-date, disaggregated city-level data. Apart from the KMC, urban transport-related data is available only from project-specific studies carried out over time. The reliability and accuracy of these datasets for further analysis have been questioned by various research publications from IIHS. Additionally, they remain difficult to obtain, process and use as they are stored in varying formats in disparate databases owned by a multiplicity of stakeholders. Moreover, once a project is completed, data collection ends and these databases are never updated again. As a result, any significant trend analysis cannot be carried out.
Therefore, even today, there is a serious demand for aggregation of good quality, standardised data on urban transport in an easily accessible central platform.
Other than the government’s need for urban transport-related data, several private companies, start-ups and research organisations have also expressed a desire for access to these datasets. As a result, some city and state governments in India have made efforts to share public transport-related data openly. For example, the Government of National Capital Territory of Delhi publishes static as well as real-time data on public buses in Delhi (Department of Transport 2019). Recently, the Government of Telangana has also made efforts to publish data on Hyderabad’s public transit on a quarterly basis.
Modelled on the National Open Digital Ecosystem (NODE) framework, the Mobility DataSpace acts as an open public digital infrastructure that enables democratised sharing of high quality standardised datasets among various stakeholders in the quadruple helix model - Government, citizens, academia, and industry, in a secure and controlled manner. The Mobility DataSpace is built on three foundational pillars - Data Delivery Platform, Governance and Community.
The following platforms and tools were built and / or deployed during the execution of the project:
1. Data Sharing Platform (https://dataspace.mobi/) is a CKAN based open source platform to deliver data to the end user. It has features to query, view and download any dataset either using the UI or the API.
2. Open Data Standards Registry (https://standards.dataspace.mobi/) is a documentation platform for data standards. The platform enables data professionals to easily understand the structure and hierarchy of a specific dataset, along with all its fields (or data points) and a detailed description of each. The platform is open source and is built from scratch. It used Protocol Buffers as an interface description language to define the data sharing standards that enables developers to easily create bindings for each data standard.
3. Open Data Licence Registry (to be built) was envisaged for data principals (owners) to be able to easily mix-and-match diverse modules (or licence clauses) based on their sharing preferences and finally create a customised data licence to be attached to each dataset.
4. Data Preprocessing Pipeline was deployed in Faridabad to automate data fetching directly from ATCS (Adaptive Traffic Control System), standardise it based on our specifically developed Open Data Standards and finally onboard it to our Data Sharing Platform. The pipelines were deployed on Apache Nifi which is an open source project.
5. Data Monitoring Dashboard (to be built) was envisaged as a monitoring dashboard for the city administrators to understand data consumption and use in real-time. These insights can be used for audit of resources, consumption and even data monetisation in the future. The dashboard was to be built on Grafana, an open source project. This was part of the Data Governance effort within the fellowship project.
6. Landing Page (https://about.dataspace.mobi/) was created as an entry point for the citizens to understand and get inspired with the motivations behind DataSpace Mobility, its components and general information about the project.
7. Co-creation and Innovation was explored by collaborating with developers via Github. This was meant to truly explore the open source community and scale the project development further.
8. Smart Move Official Website (https://smartmove.niua.org/): The landing page of the Challenge was part of the work done by the fellows to guide both participants and data partners during the course of the SmartMove Challenge.
9. Hackathon Registration Platform (https://hack.dataspace.mobi/) based on the open source project Quill by HACKMIT was customised for the SmartMove Challenge and deployed through the DataSpace Mobility. The platform has been utilised by more than 450 registered participants to form groups, submit concept notes of the proposals and register for the Challenge. The participants got access to the data via our Data Sharing Platform.
10. Secure Data Locker (https://storage.dataspace.mobi/) is a secure blob data storage platform meant for the cities to submit data for the SmartMove Challenge. In the exclusive locker, the data partners can easily aggregate their data by just drag-and-dropping, facilitating the data collaboration with the broader community. It was an instance of Pydio, an open source platform.
All the products built were deployed for Faridabad and / or SmartMove Challenge and some of these tools are made available through https://dataspace.mobi
