Providing Near Real-Time Traffic Information within Spatial Data Infrastructures

Current routing or navigation applications can be improved by including up-to-date traffic information such as traffic volume, congestions, construction, and so on. In order to make such near real-time data readily available, there is still a very important need for standards and associated technologies within spatial data infrastructures (SDIs). This need was addressed within the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) by the development of several standards within the Sensor Web Enablement (SWE) initiative. These emerging SWE standards coupled with other new specifications for location services (OpenLS) and the Web processing service (WPS) interface can help reach a new level of complexity for geographic information (GI) applications and thus requires new questions on architectures to be answered and best practices made available. This paper presents how we integrated near realtime traffic data into SDIs based on current standards to improve an existing routing application.