Activity 6: Enhanced Usability

The DATEX II model is growing in two directions: further depth in the existing functional parts as well as a growing number of functional parts. As a result, it is growing in complexity, rendering the accessibility and applicability of the model a burden for new users. This activity aims to tackle these issues. One example of such effort is the creation of functional and logical information containers (profiles and submodels) based on a shared information model containing the common parts, thereby improving usability through excluding unnecessary elements for particular users.

In particular, there is a strong demand by road operators to open up their data to app developers in order to achieve maximum usability in the Open Data domain. This would foster a more widespread use of traffic information as well new uses for data combined with other sources. The applicability of DATEX II in the open data domain can be improved by supporting standards that are used in the app development world. As a result, the model will need modifications to support both the current complex data structures for use in advanced traffic engineering environments, as well as simpler data structures for more information provision-oriented services.

Another topic addressed in this activity is ASN.1 support. For certain purposes, the use of the XML based web services is too data consuming. To offer a lighter distribution mechanism of the data, the ASN.1 standard is available. This activity therefore collects the required supporting information to be exchanged in ASN.1 within the stakeholder community.

The DATEX II RAV Centre (Reference Advice and Validation), initially included in Activity 1 as part of user support, is nowadays part of this activity as well. Since the DATEX II standard has been established, interoperability in terms of traffic data exchange even on an international level becomes more relevant in terms of enabling real-time based road management operations. Interoperability between two or more DATEX II systems can only be achieved having data elements commonly specified with so-called recommended or minimum EU profiles. In order to allow DATEX II developers to check individually generated DATEX II profiles against the minimum and recommended EU profiles, an online based DATEX II validation tool was developed: The DATEX II RAV Centre (Reference Advice and Validation). The tool itself provides validation and parsing rules to be used for obtaining a high-quality compliance check. In other words, the testing tool (also referred to as DATEX II testcenter) provides a simple and harmonized procedure for validating individually generated DATEXII profiles and hence supports harmonised DATEX II deployment.

Finally, the widening of the DATEX II domain leads to an increase in the “Use Case” domains for cases beyond TMS, such as parking information, navigation information, other information derived from future technologies. Therefore, use cases are collected, along with defining the information subsets to assemble a profiled version of DATEX II when needed.