Building a highway of data in the cloud

Wanted: A cloud infrastructure where the vendor is responsible for not only the technology, but moving petabytes of data from legacy systems and making it all available on multiple form factors.

It’s a simple request from the Transportation Department’s Federal Highway Administration in a new request for information.

“Only a small percentage of FHWA’s data is posted on public servers and websites. In many cases these data are hosted to multiple public servers, which may not use the same standard services and formats,” the RFI stated. “Therefore, it is difficult to find and integrate data from these sources for cross-domain analysis and decision-making. Furthermore, FHWA’s large data volumes require users to have substantial network, storage and computing capabilities of their own in order to interact with and exploit the value of these data. FHWA is exploring opportunities to unleash the potential of its transportation data through alternative approaches to strategically position these data with analytic and computational capabilities.”

The FHWA asks vendors to submit response to 29 questions across seven functional areas, such as data services, data infrastructure and partnership methods.

“The expectation is that a copy of FHWA data moved to the cloud would remain free to the public in its original, unaltered form, but this model will enable the hosting partner to establish and perhaps charge for new value-added services and products,” the RFI stated. “The free data must be easily accessible and have the same visibility on the hosting entities website as any value-added services or products. A proposed solution must also enable FHWA compliance with existing and future federal open data policies…”

The RFI likely is part of DoT push to take advantage of its data and offer companies and citizens more access to its information. DoT recently hired Dan Morgan as its chief data officer — one of the first ones in government — to lead this effort. Morgan said in December that he’s focused on the quality of the data, and will release a framework for DoT components to follow.

Responses to the RFI are due March 26.

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