The ITS Observatory is intended to become the one-stop shop for information and insight about ITS deployment in Europe. Through a user-friendly input interface, content providers (e.g. ITS owners, managers & suppliers) will enter information about their ITS implementations, describing the location and type of ITS, whom to contact for more information and summarising any evaluation results. Users will be able to search the knowledge base

The ITS Observatory will offer the ITS Community access to timely and reliable facts on existing and ongoing ITS implementation all over Europe, as well as the best available information on deployment outcomes (e.g. impacts & benefits) to help them develop and apply ITS policy objectives and strategies.

Content will be user-generated and entered by ITS community experts as a self-sustainable platform. To encourage these future users to enter content and to use the ITS Observatory, it is vital that sufficient content is added before the Observatory will become fully operational. However, as knowledge of ITS often is not easily accessible in existing media/databases, a 4-step strategy for gathering content to the ITS Observatory has been developed:

  1. Pilot trials, assessment and creation of tools by consortium members with links to a particular ITS National Association (ITSNA);
  2. Market analysis and assisted initial content entry by experts from selected ITS National Associations;
  3. Ongoing assisted and self-service content entry by members from all ITS National Associations with coordination by ITSNA;
  4. Fully operational self-service content entry by general ITS community.

In the first step the central part was to collect knowledge about ITS Nationals in order to select the best possible path to gather sufficient ITS content. In the second step market analyses on the data collection gathered in step one has been carried out and selected ITS experts will help with the content collection. In the third step, it is planned that all ITS Nationals will provide content for the ITS Observatory, while in step four it will be the full ITS community that will collect content for entering the ITS Observatory. Via this step-wise approach, it is likely that the initial content provision will generate sufficient content to make the ITS Observatory attractive for ITS providers to fill in additional information on other ITS projects. Let the avalanche of ITS knowledge roll…