Introduction

Mobility and travel get us to places – real world locations.  Most of us are familiar with relating real world locations to one form of model or other, such as a map. This is the essence of location referencing – relating a real world position or object to a modelled representation of the world.  Thus, the way in which we organise data related to travel is done by creating models of the real-world – models that support efficient processes, query and retrieval. As one would expect for different business purposes and in different communities different concepts have led to a diversity in the forms of these models.  This can create practical challenges for organisations and individuals who are trying to assimilate or aggregate data from different sources or share data between disparate services and applications – as the rules governing different forms of model have not be built to support interoperability between these models.

Due to the nature of the siloed developments for different application there are, for individual applications, no hooks, as the location referencing system has been designed to only fulfil the needs of that application. The problems come when one needs to combine or compare the data and information from one application with that from another.

The challenge of this Project Team is to address the need to provide means of improving the integration and translation between different relevant forms of location reference – through the provision of guidance and in some cases technical solutions.

Objective

The objective of the project is twofold:

1. to summarise the background and the existence of the multitude of location referencing systems used by Urban Administrations backed up by a database of occurrences of location referencing schema, and
2. to create a specification that will detail a toolkit for building translators/concentrators between the profiles of location referencing systems used within an urban authority.

Scope

Objective 1 will result in a CEN Technical Report:

Intelligent Transport Systems ‐ Location Referencing Harmonisation for Urban‐ITS ‐ Part 1: State of the art and guidelines

With the following scope: Applicable location referencing specifications, standards and Directives; a concise guide to location referencing methodologies; based on a survey of location referencing methodologies applicable to European transport authorities and operators.

Objective 2 will result in a CEN Technical Specification:

Intelligent Transport Systems ‐ Location Referencing Harmonisation for Urban‐ITS ‐ Part 2: Translation methods

with the following scope:Specification of translations between location referencing methods applicable in the urban transport environment.