The Department for Transport (DfT) is in the early stages of creating a service for the National Access Point (NAP) catalogue of transport metadata.
It is planning to begin a discovery process during October, with the aim of making it easier for users to find transport data from a variety of public and private sources.
The main users are expected to be local authorities and transport industry professionals, although it could also be of use to software developers.
While the DfT has a Smarter Traffic Management team working on the project and has begun a procurement for support, saying it has already drafted a potential set of features and metadata for the NAP.
Digital layer
The programme derives from an EU initiative to provide a digital layer interlinking the data to support a single European transport area.
It involves member states setting up their own NAPs to facilitate the reuse of transport related data. They can take various forms, such as a database, data warehouse, data marketplace, register or web portal aimed at making it easier to fuse and analyse datasets. The data has to be accessible on a non-discriminatory basis.
The DfT has also indicated that it plans to implement the NAP beyond the scope of the original EU directive to take in specified data for all roads.
Picture from GOV.UK, Open Government Licence v3.0
