Glossary

A-B-C

Activity

When connecting to your personal account on the platform, you are automatically directed to the Activity dashboard. The Activity dashboard allows you to visualise the daily transportation picture and monitor all mobility services' activity in the city.

API

An Application Programming Interface is a computing interface that defines interactions between multiple software intermediaries. It defines the kinds of calls or requests that can be made, how to make them, the data formats that should be used, the conventions to follow, etc.

APIaaS

Application programming Interface as a Service. APIaaS is a service platform that enables the creation and hosting of APIs.

D-E-F

Device

A Device commonly refers to a vehicle, used for transporting persons or things. Different types of Devices can be found on the public right-of-way, such as:

bikes 🚲
bus 🚌
cars 🚗
delivery trucks 🚚
e-scooters 🛴
mopeds 🛵

DPIA

Data Protection Impact Assessment. A DPIA is a process designed to help you systematically analyse, identify and minimise the data protection risks of a project or plan. It is a key part of your accountability obligations under the UK GDPR, and when done properly helps you assess and demonstrate how you comply with all of your data protection obligations.

G-H-I

GBFS

The General Bikeshare Feed Specification, known as GBFS, is an open data standard for shared mobility. GBFS makes real-time data feeds in a uniform format publicly available online, with an emphasis on findability.

Keep reading: General Bikeshare Feed Specification

GDPR

General Data Protection Regulation. At its core, GDPR is a new set of rules designed to give EU citizens more control over their personal data. It aims to simplify the regulatory environment for business so both citizens and businesses in the European Union can fully benefit from the digital economy.

J-K-L

KPI

Vianova Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) give time-varying statistical summaries of fleet-behavior for a given client/city/operator. All KPIs are derived from the Fleet State as inferred from ingested provider-feeds. KPIs require a specific moment in time to compute, and sometimes (for Periodic KPIs) an end-time to compute time-aggregated statistics. Fleet Size, Trip Counts, Trip Distance/Duration, Vehicle Rotation are some of the KPIs made available by Vianova.

Keep reading: KPI Definitions and Computation

Last Mile

Originally referred to the last section of a network or grid from the last distribution point to the user, in New Mobility it usually refers to the distance between a trip’s starting or end point and the next (public) transport hub such as a train station or airport.

M-N-O

MaaS

Mobility-as-a-Service is a type of service that through a joint digital channel enables users to plan, book, and pay for multiple types of mobility services. The concept describes a shift away from personally-owned modes of transportation and towards mobility provided as a service.

MDS

The Mobility Data Specification (MDS) is a set of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) focused on dockless e-scooters, bicycles, mopeds and carshare. The goals of MDS are to provide a standardized way for municipalities or other regulatory agencies to ingest, compare and analyze data from mobility service providers, and to give municipalities the ability to express regulation in machine-readable formats.

Keep reading: Mobility Data Specification

P-Q-R

RBAC

Role-Based Access Control. RBAC is a method of restricting network access based on the roles of individual users within an enterprise. RBAC lets employees have access rights only to the information they need to do their jobs and prevents them from accessing information that doesn't pertain to them.

Regulation

The Regulation dashboard allows you to digitally translate regulation and road safety rules into the platform. Notably, you can create, edit, visualize or delete policies, as well as monitor real time infringement of these policies.

Keep reading: The Regulation Dashboard

Ride Hailing

Taxi-like on-demand chauffeured rides. This term is usually used for rides with TNCs like Uber or Didi although it could also be applied for any Taxi ride or demand-responsive transport (DRT) ride. Ride Hailing is NOT Ride Sharing! Usually you share the ride only with the driver, which is a chauffeured ride but not a shared ride as you don’t share it with other passengers. The driver would not drive the route without your order. Ride Hailing can be combined with Ride Sharing in case the driver picks up passengers along the way, like with UberPool, CleverShuttle, IOKI or MyTaxi/FreeNow Match. Synonyms are Ride Selling and Ride Sourcing.

S-T-U

Sandbox

In computer security, a sandbox is a security mechanism for separating running programs, usually in an effort to mitigate system failures and/or software vulnerabilities from spreading. It is a testing environment to isolate untested code changes in the context of software development

SaaS

Software as a Service

Search Horizon

If you want to know what is the current status of a particular device, you need to historically look for the latest known state of this device by looking at the historical collections of events from the Provider API. That's what we call the Search Horizon.

Keep reading: Fleet Size Calculation

Surge Pricing

Monetary incentive via increased prices for ride hailing drivers to make themselves available in high demand areas. The concept is widely used by ride hailing companies like Uber.

Use Case

In software and systems engineering, a use case is a list of actions or event steps typically defining the interactions between a role and a system to achieve a goal. The actor can be a human or other external system.