+447835 219864

Data Discovery Centre

Data Discovery Centre ‘pops up’ at Traffex, 4-6 April 2017, NEC, Birmingham

#discoverdata @Traffex2017

LATEST: See our DfT Digital blogpost on Data Sharing and Collaboration in the West Midlands

NEW: Data Discovery Centre Resources (podcasts, videos, presentations)

We thought a Data Discovery Centre would be a perfect next step to follow #brumdatahack.  Thanks to those lovely people at Traffex, we have the chance to test out our theory, live, in the middle of Europe’s largest highways and traffic exhibition 😉 (no pressure then…!!).

Traffex banner

Logo for Data Discovery Centre at Traffex

With our purpose-built centre at stand G81, we’ll be working with visualisation tools to make sense of the #brumdatahack datasets.

We’ll be unlocking the mysteries that lie undiscovered in existing datasets. And we’ve got some friends popping by to help you learn to code, play with lego, and see that fabulous new product Yotta are launching in summer 2017 – yep that’ll be Alloy!!

This will be great fun, and gives us a wonderful opportunity to learn and explore what a more permanent Data Discovery Centre should be and do.

Traffex floorplan extract

Why what we’re doing is important:

Tony Malone, Chief Information Officer, and IT Executive Director, Highways England:

“We [Highways England] don’t integrate with the Urban Traffic Monitoring Control (UTMC) data that local authorities use. Why not? We have the technology to do that so there are no barriers to doing it.” 
Nic Cary, Head of Data Policy, Department for Transport:
 “In this rather scary new world, where a lot of data is available for free, it’s difficult to understand how to build a business when the raw material is free. The point is, and it can’t happen overnight, but one has to move to a model where the value is what is added to turn data into information.”
Steve Gooding, Director, RAC Foundation:
“The data revolution is key to what we want to achieve. There is an immense amount of data to be had. It’s being generated by and held by multiple different organisations that don’t tend to talk to each other. I continue to be a bit frustrated about where the big steps [to address this] are going to be. When are we going to get to the point where we have a single, national, free, open geo-referencing of our highways assets?  Without this we’re going to be hampered forever more. Yes to more open data, more widely available.” 
Shane O’Neill, Chairman, Elgin:
 “We need to get our heads round the problem that data has to move across boundaries and be permissioned. Many organisations, including local and strategic highways authorities, logistics companies, satellite navigation companies are all part of this ecosystem. All this information needs to be recognised, permissioned and in real time.  To do that, one needs to set up an enabling mechanism, and to do that, you need to understand all this conceptually.”

Visit us at stand G81 where you can:

  1. Meet SME’s, industry and universities already working to make existing West Midlands highways and transport data easier to use:
  • Project DISC, Birmingham City University (they have lego….!)

2. Sign up your SME to join the Innovation Engine programme and work with project partners Amey, Transport for West Midlands and Birmingham City University

3. Share your thoughts on how we should manage network resilience more effectively, and the need for a national HighwaysAPI

4. Learn more about the West Midlands Combined Authority Network Resilience Strategy, and data sharing principles for highways asset management in the region:

Subscribe to receive updates on the Data Discovery Centre

* indicates required




© DEFT153 Ltd. All Rights Reserved.