Department for Transport’s discovery phase reveals need for more consistency and ‘one version of truth’ in data for road works
The Department for Transport (DfT) is planning to move to the alpha phase in its project to develop a new street manager service as a replacement for its Electronic Transfer of Notifications system for road works.
The chief executive of JAG(UK), the organisation of highway and road authorities that has supported the project, told the GeoPlace 2017 conference that the plans for an alpha product follow an eight-week discovery phase.
The new service will provide a data hub for planning, managing and monitoring street works, and a source of open data.
Jerry McConkey (pictured) said the recently completed discovery phase revealed the need for more consistency and accuracy of the data used in street management, the need to provide live streams of data for the public and to include additional datasets.
He said there is also a need for “one version of the truth” in the data to support informed choices, and emphasised the importance of the National Street Gazetteer, the definitive dataset for streets in England Wales, managed by GeoPlace and updated by highway authorities.
“For me as an engineer I’ve grown to realise the National Street Gazetteer is key to all this,” McConkey said. “Through the migration to DFTA 8.1 (Data Transfer Format) 6 million data improvements were made, a massive step forward.
