DfT - Real Time Events Data

We require access to structured, historical and near real time event data in order to understand when, where, and what types of transport relevant events have occurred across England (e.g. road incidents, disruptions, major public events).

This dataset is needed to

• Provide ground truth / reference events against which social media signals (via the Pulsar API or other sources) can be compared and interpreted.
• Support analysis of alignment between known real world events and observed social media activity (e.g. volume, topics, sentiment).
• Improve our understanding of which types of events generate a social media response, and therefore when social media data is likely to be informative or misleading.
• Enable model development and evaluation, including testing detection, classification, and prioritisation approaches for situational awareness use cases.
• Without an external, curated event dataset, we would not be able to reliably interpret social media data, validate analytical approaches, or assess whether observed signals correspond to real world transport events.