Shared and Sovereign Transport & Mobility can use the same data sharing standards.

Our work has led us to creating the Open Standard for customer account data sharing across the transport & mobility sector. This allows any transport account to be able to securely share specific data (e.g. mobility products, journeys and travel discounts) with named & agreed third parties. It is similar in principle to other data sharing initiatives such as Open Banking and Open Finance, an overall technology named ‘Smart Data’ by the UK Government.

Decentralized or Sovereign data is a different approach, in that personal data does not reside in a number of different user accounts across an ecosystem. Instead, this data sits in a Sovereign account controlled / managed by the customer and the user grants each party access to just the data they require.

Our approach enables a consolidated view of transport & mobility account data from different participating providers (either in one or more accounts, including third party ones). Whereas the decentralised approach uses an additional account, typically called a Mobility Data Space, to manage all the user’s transport data in a single location (with the transport providers potentially seeing far less data about the individual).

But….

Both are ways of sharing mobility data.

Both help the user to be in control of their own data and allow it to be viewed and used for better mobility outcomes – e.g. to plan and travel in faster, easier and greener ways.

Both rely on the exchange of non-personal transport data, such as: tickets purchased, usage made via each specific mode or vehicle and even the concessions the individual is allowed to use.

So why don’t they both use the same standard for the sharing of this same data?

Or put another way… why create a very similar customer mobility data sharing standard for Decentralized or Sovereign transport data when one already exists for shared / Smart transport data?

We would welcome the opportunity to work with any other organisation working on any sort of decentralized transport & mobility initiative.
contact@opentransport.co.uk