Financed under the EC eContent initiative, COSTE is a Definition Phase project aimed at facilitating the access to, the integration, use and commercial exploitation of geographic and traffic digital contents available from Public Administrations in Europe.

THE PROJECT

In order to achieve this, COSTE investigated and defined suitable methods, operational procedures and technological infrastructures to support on-line data access, the integration of contents from different data sources, the production and the exploitation of digital maps combining data from these two sectors. The interest in these fundamental issues at the core of the digital content value chain is common to all European countries, as of general interest are the implications of the theme on different sectors of engineering and management of traffic, mobility, transport, land use and citizens oriented services.

Over the last years, the use of combined geographical, land and traffic digital contents has gained increasing relevance. Thanks to the availability of advanced ICT solutions, such as, e.g., internet and web services, on-board computers, etc., these types of digital contents are more and more becoming a key factor for the success of realisation and operation of the Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS). For instance, the combined use of digital maps and dynamic traffic information is a fundamental requirement of today’s’ traffic information and management systems. This enables, on the one hand, evaluating the conditions of the transport network and taking appropriate control decisions, on the other hand, to provide road users with updated information about traffic and mobility.

However, this is not the only sector which depends in a fundamental measure on the availability of combined geographic and traffic contents. These are relevant for several other applications and services including, for instance: land and resource planning and use, planning and operation of infrastructures, Location Based Services (for e.g. tourism, commerce, etc.), event management, emergency management, etc.

Despite such relevant implications, the digital maps available today are mainly providing geographical, spatial and road network related information, without mobility and traffic related data. Moreover, they hardly provide suitable tools and methods to facilitate the combination of contents from these two sectors. In most cases, the different digital contents are owned by Public Administrations, are organised according to different data models often incompatible each other, are hosted by IT systems provided with different data access interfaces. All of this, limits severely data accessibility, makes data combination and integration difficult and costly and represents a main barrier to the use and potential exploitation of the relevant digital content asset owned by the public administration

The COSTE Definition Phase project addressed the above context, with the aim of studying and defining suitable solutions to enable affective integration of combined spatial and mobility (traffic, transport) related contents for the development and delivery of value added end user services. The figure below provides a schematic illustration of the content value chain adopted as a reference within COSTE.

CONSORTIUM

A consolidated research group with a renowned academic and industrial profile.

• algoWatt SpA (IT)
• Municipality of Genoa (IT)
• Interactive Instruments GmbH (DE)
• Momatec GmbH (DE)
• Ministry of Transport, Energy and Land Planning of NRW Region (DE)