Transport Statistics at the German Aerospace Center - A first step towards interlinked portals

Abstract

In the field of transportation research at German Aerospace Center (DLR) more than 20 research institutes deal with a huge variety of transport and traffic aspects. While most of them cover rather technological aspects and research questions, two institutes collect statistics for transportation and mobility and provide it for the national and international research community. With the MONITOR portal the institute of Air Transport and Airport Research intends to support actors with information and statistics on long-term air transport development. Besides that, MONITOR also contains a sector for some 40 indicators on global air transport development, providing a fast and clear overview on long-term trends in the air transport sector dealing with topics such as the global airline fleet, airline traffic and financial performance, airport traffic and financial performance. Since 2000 the Clearing House of Transport and Mobility situated at the Institute for Transport Research acts as the official provider for German household surveys and statistics. Public funded travel and mobility surveys (e.g. Mobility in Germany, German Mobility Panel, etc.) are described at and provided by the Clearing House portal. This is accompanied by information about similar statistical data sets and data portals in Europe. Those two DLR data portals MONITOR and the Clearing House for Transport and Mobility cover similar aspects of different transport modes – namely air transport and personal mobility affecting mainly road and public transport. By now, collected statistics and data base elements could not be accessed simultaneously. Transport researches and other users could not have a direct benefit in combining statistics and data elements of both portals directly. The main reason was, that corresponding data description formats and data base technologies were not harmonized for historical reasons. Especially data description formats of the portals were defined with particular respect to desired content and constraints of funding schemes and clients. It was found that not even those - from a contextual view-point quite similar – portals in question and its content could be merged due to technological issues. Thus, the idea was born to create an external search and analyzing system allowing parallel access to and, thus, a first stage of comparability between mentioned data bases. Together with the DLR facility on Simulations and Software Technology a common engine was created which allows users to search for statistics, data and META information on a “global” level. The paper describes the challenges, efforts and the technical implementation of the system as well as the huge benefit for DLR and external researchers. Special attention will be laid on the harmonization of applied data description formats which have been merged into a common META format. This will be used for fast search within the derived data base and for visualizing search results in a faceted manner.