HERE Real-Time Traffic Sucks Up Car And Smart City Sensor Data

Digital mapping firm HERE has revealed a traffic service that integrates live data sucked up from vehicle sensors and  traffic probes to serve up more accurate information about traffic conditions.

Dubbed Real-Time Traffic, the service takes data from Audi, BMW and Mercedes cards to be mixed with its own GPS and mapping data and information from traffic monitoring sources to fuel the service.

HERE Real-Time Traffic is being offered to the company’s current  and future customers across all manner of industries and covering more than 60 countries.

“This is the world’s first traffic service to aggregate live rich vehicle sensor data from competing car brands and it represents a major step by HERE to make driving safer and more efficient for people everywhere,” said Ralf Herrtwich, senior vice president of HERE’s Automotive division.

“While it helps drivers making informed decisions behind the wheel today, it also moves us closer to realising our vision of a live representation of the road environment needed for both advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) and self-driving applications.“

IoT on the road

While traffic alerts and harnessing vehicle data is nothing new, combining these various data sources and using them to extract rich and useful information is the very core of what the Internet of Things (IoT) and smart cities aim to embody.

It is also an example of how the benefits of interconnected technologies and the IoT will be truly realised not by individual companies but by different firms and organisations working together and sharing data.

This may sound like a rather idealistic view, given the competition in the technology industry, and can throw up concerns around data privacy and security.

But done right, such as using aggregated data in the fashion HERE is doing, the benefits of open data and access to various technologies can pave the way for new services and products without infringing upon people’s privacy or the chance for companies to come up with competitive offerings.

With the continued development of driverless car technology, data rich services are likely to be needed if autonomous vehicles are to truly flourish.

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