Public and private decisionmakers must understand the freight transportation system, its use, its role in economic development, its environmental impact, as well as other consequences in order to respond effectively to growing logistical requirements of businesses and households. This understanding draws on many disparate data sources covering commodity movements, relationships among sectors of the economy, international trade, freight traffic, supply chains, and transportation services and infrastructure. These data sources are difficult to link into useful information because they are collected under a variety of definitions and time scales, geographic levels, and aspects of transportation. Efforts to bridge these differences with analytical techniques or new data collections tend to be ad hoc or cover only part of the freight transportation universe.
Several studies and conferences by TRB and its Cooperative Research Programs call for a national freight data architecture to link existing data sets and guide new data collections. None of these calls define what is meant by data architecture or how it would be designed and implemented. Existing examples of explicit national data architectures or analytical frameworks with implicit architectures—such as the International Trade Data System (ITDS), Freight Analysis Framework (FAF), National Income and Product Accounts (NIPA), Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) Data Architecture, and the National Spatial Data Infrastructure (NSDI)—have not been evaluated as elements of an architecture for analyzing freight transportation issues. The value and challenges of creating a national freight data architecture must be established.
The objectives of this project are to develop the specifications for the content and structure of a freight data architecture, to identify the value and challenges of the potential architecture, and to specify institutional strategies to develop and maintain the architecture. This architecture should serve the needs of public and private decisionmakers at the national, state, and local levels.
