New deliverable on Transport Open Data, properties and specifications for Open Science

Following the deliverable 4.1, which presents the main legal issues and fundamental principles of utilizing Open Science in transport research, D4.2 on "Transport Open Data: Properties and Specifications for Open Science," objectives are to: i) identify available open big data in the transport research sector, and ii) provide recommendations for making them FAIR, in order to feed the TOPOS Observatory and Forum development in WP3.

The deliverable is organised as follows:

• identifies and analyses open big datasets in the transport sector;
• presents the FAIR principles and a set of recommendations to the transport research community for improving the FAIRness of their research data. FAIRness principles and indicators are evaluated on two selected open big research data among pNEUMA and the Cityscapes 3D dataset;
• presents two useful tools for Research Data Management practices: Argos for the definition of data management plans and Amnesia for the anonymisation of sensitive information in research data.

Open Big Data in the transport research sector are not easy to find. This report confirms the remarks of the HLEG report and the NOESIS project regarding the low uptake of FAIR and Open principles by the transport research community, especially when big datasets are involved. Transport research is inherently cross-disciplinary and so provides an ideal context in which to apply principles such as FAIR but unfortunately, “most of the data that these researchers collect is used once and then stored away in locations that are inaccessible to other researchers.”

You can read and download the full report here: https://beopen-project.eu/storage/files/beopen-d42-transport-open-data-properties-and-specifications-for-open-science.pdf