The principle of ‘open by default’ has great benefits but also costs and commercial implications. Hence making more rail data accessible requires understanding which data has high value and creating sufficient incentives for its ready supply.

Making data more easily usable requires cross-industry standards and formats that reduce the time and cost associated with processing, integrating and federating data sets. Cross-industry standards and formats also have an essential role to play in making a wider set of knowledge and resources machine readable.

Great insights from data increasingly come from emerging, fast-moving, data-driven technologies such as AI and Digital Twins. Hence the opportunity is to encourage and navigate the introduction and successful use of such technologies, making rail an informed customer and user.

Improving awareness of data-related threats and cyber resilience, including re-establishing desired status at pace following perturbation, is essential in an increasing digital railway.

Systems designed to maximise trust in data, with quality systematically maintained against recognised metrics, with automated flags for any issues within critical data sets.