A federated cloud solution for transnational mobility data sharing

Nowadays, innovative digital services are massively spreading both in the public and private sectors. In this work we focus on the digital data regarding the mobility of persons and goods, which are experiencing exponential growth thanks to the significant diffusion of telecommunication infrastructures and inexpensive GPS-equipped devices. The volume, velocity, and heterogeneity of mobility data call for advanced and efficient services to collect and integrate various data sources from different data producers. The MobiDataLab H2020 project aims to deal with these challenges by introducing an efficient and highly interoperable digital framework for mobility data sharing. In particular, the project aims to propose to the mobility stakeholders (i.e., transport organising authorities, operators, industry, governments, and innovators) reproducible methodologies and sustainable tools that can foster the development of a data-sharing culture in Europe and beyond. This paper introduces the key concepts driving the design and definition of a cloud-based data-sharing federation we call the Transport Cloud platform, which represents one of the main pillars of the MobiDataLab project. Such platform aims to ensure transnational access to mobility data in a secure, efficient, and seamless way, and to ensure that FAIR principles (i.e., mobility data should be findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable) are enforced.