Case Study • National Highways

Introduction

National Highways plan, design, build, operate and maintain England's motorways and major A roads, collectively known as the strategic road network (SRN). Between 2020 and 2025, National Highways will be investing £27.4 billion in the SRN in order to achieve their objective of providing safer, smoother and more reliable journeys for the public. A key part of their Strategic Business Plan (SBP) governing this investment is to utilise data more effectively in order to improve safety, reduce network disruption, increase standardisation and enable adoption of emerging technologies.

National Highways

The Challenge

National Highways operates within a complex multi-stakeholder ecosystem which, prior to 2020, was characterised by disparate data assets with poor data governance, data quality, accessibility and visibility. In order for it to deliver its objective of harnessing data and technology to improve the Strategic Road Network (SRN), including its vision for Digital Roads, it sought to significantly improve its data management capabilities by developing a common data model to enable a common data language that can be shared and understood by both users and digital systems alike.

Digital Roads

What We Did

We developed an ontology-based conceptual data model and built an associated web user interface (UI) that enabled users to visualise, explore, identify and semantically query National Highways' knowledge assets, data and relationships.

Ontological Data Model

Semantic Queries

Network Visualisation

Cognitive Search

Data Pipelines

REST APIs

Source Code

Key Outcomes

Our solution enables National Highways' users (both internal teams and external suppliers alike) to easily explore, identify, consume and link together relevant data assets within their complex data management landscape. It delivers significantly improved data accessibility and visibility, thereby increasing trust in data and supporting better and more timely evidence-based decision making.