The Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) is looking to move its wealth of transportation data into the cloud to allow greater access for commercial and government groups, and is searching for potential technology partners to facilitate the transition.
The agency issued a request for information in late January looking for a cloud hosting solution as well as potential partners to help make its data more widely available. A no-cost agreement is the suggested mechanism for both agreements. Such an agreement would create two scenarios benefitting each partner:
- The cloud-hosting partner would be able to create new value-added services based on the FHWA data and charge for them; and
- Any data-sharing partners would use their own funds to shift FHWA data to the cloud and/or their own infrastructure.
As things currently stand, FHWA transportation data is scattered across a variety of public servers and websites in multiple formats, making integrated data analysis extremely difficult. Compounding the situation is the large amount of network storage and computing power needed to handle the vast amounts of information. FHWA is hoping to reduce the burden and allow greater access for future analysis and economic development.
Interested partners must submit proposals by March 26.
