Digitraffic offers an extensive and open data interface for information on various modes of transport in Finland. Nodeon takes advantage of this data in its traffic analyses, integrates it into customer-specific data, and provides efficient tools for a situational overview and historical data on the traffic on Finland’s main road network.
Sharing data in the possession of public administration with the private sector is part of an EU-wide trend. The aim is to create new business with the help of the data. The opportunities are significant, given that the public administration has some interesting information pools.
This trend can also be beneficial to its funders – after all, the systems and information pools of the public administration were paid for by the tax revenue derived from citizens and corporations.
Digitraffic has a lengthy history in Finland. Originally, its development began in the early 2000s in a project run by VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland and the Helsinki University of Technology, aiming to produce increasingly sophisticated services in the field of intelligent transportation systems.
After many development phases, the interface now includes a significant amount of transportation and environmental condition data in relation to road, maritime and rail transport. The data is produced by the state-owned Traffic Management Finland, the Finnish Transport Infrastructure Agency, and the Finnish Transport and Communications Agency Traficom.
Find out the increase in the volume of, say, heavy vehicle traffic at any measuring point with a couple clicks
SIGNIFICANT INVESTMENTS IN THE USE OF OPEN DATA
Open data interfaces offer a free channel into significant amounts of data. Companies would nevertheless do well to remember that even though the data itself is free, its collection, storage, and processing may also require significant investments.
This is also true in Nodeon’s case. The working hours spent on the collection and processing of Digitraffic data is no longer counted even in the hundreds.
The opportunities offered using open data are nevertheless considerable. Now that all Digitraffic data, from as far back as the 1990s, has been stored for the use of Nodeon’s traffic data analysis tool, users can get a situational overview of traffic across the country with a single click of their mouse.
In addition to situational overviews, the analysis of the historical data can offer significant advantages. Nodeon’s system can, for example, find out the precise quantitative and relative increase in the volume of heavy vehicle traffic regarding any measuring point in the 2010s with a couple clicks.
Nodeon continues to process the open data, with the objective of being able to provide even more valuable analyses. We are already amalgamating the data of Traficom, the Population Register Centre, and Digitraffic in our analyses.
This development offers significant benefits to our customers. We provide data collected from open data sources as part of customer-specific systems, giving cities, for example, a chance to get a picture of the situation and development of the main arteries around them, in addition to a picture of the city’s internal traffic situation.