On Friday, 7 October, the MaaS Alliance Working Group, Technology and Standards publishes a White Paper on Mobility Data Spaces and MaaS. In the previous MaaS Market Playbook, the MaaS Alliance advocated for “Advanced data sharing models and incentive schemes”, which naturally leads to the Mobility Data Spaces. Mobility Data Spaces can be seen as the potential answer to support the development of fair and trusted data-sharing models and incentives. In the long run, they should enable the roll-out of sustainable MaaS services and the development of the MaaS market with potential solutions to the challenges of setting up MaaS services:

• Interoperability of systems (data, protocols, connectivity);
• Agreements of implementation (governance, legal);
• Terms of business (financial, subsidies).

The core objectives of Mobility Data Spaces are to support the uptake and wider usage of shared mobility means (intermodal or multimodal) by establishing a trusted technical environment for data usage between multiple stakeholders. Their minimal mandatory features are; Access to the data; Sharing the data between two parties; and Adding value to the data.

The data exchange and trust setting are created via a set of APIs that provide authentication and authorisation. First, the API caller initiates a connection through a Connector API with the Data Space. Then, the connection with the actual API provider, also with Connector API.

Datasets within the same Mobility Data Space should also be expressed in any data standard that is relevant to the parties sharing and working on these datasets. The MaaS Alliance recommends ensuring that data standards are interoperable and mapped toward more aligned data models for better consistency. The best practice is to set and use reference semantics such as Transmodel as the widest data model for mobility.

Access the White Paper.