IT and Legal at RNE
A considerable part of RNE’s portfolio relates to IT and data services provided to the European railway sector (e.g. infrastructure managers, railway undertakings, terminal operators, combined transport operators).
RNE owns and operates several unique IT applications, which cover capacity allocation and traffic management in most EU Member States (e.g. PCS and TIS), as well as other elements of rail infrastructure management (e.g. basic topology, maintenance works, charging, RFC routings, service facilities). RNE is also a frontrunner in TAF TSI proliferation activities on the side of the infrastructure managers.
With regard to RNE’s IT and data activities, the RNE Legal Matters Working Group is assigned with the permanent task to introduce, maintain and keep up to date the licence agreements, responding in a timely manner to new technical and legal developments within and beyond the railway sector. The RNE JO legal team is also in charge of the contract management of all IT applications with the end users and the respective suppliers.
Legal studies on non-personal data
In addition, in the last years RNE has been a pioneer in the transport sector regarding the legal analysis of non-personal data. These studies are an open access publication. They are licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the publisher, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made. They are freely available without charge to the user or his or her organisation without asking prior permission from RNE or the author(s). These studies can be found here:
RNE Non-personal data activities
Based on these solid legal analyses, the association has developed the RNE Non-Personal Data Policy. It relates to business information available in RNE IT applications. The management of railway networks and train movements (co-)generates huge amounts of non-personal data every day. Yet, access to this data and its re-use within and beyond the transport sector is still hampered by factors such as an unclear legal framework, the lack of an EU single market for data and the absence of cross-sector interoperability. To address those challenges, RNE took the initiative to self-determine its framework for access to, use of, exchange and sharing of (raw) industrial data.
Thus, the RNE Non-Personal Data Policy consists of a main body and two annexes, namely an RNE data inventory and an RNE IT service catalogue. In the main body topics such as the general economic and legal environment of data, confidentiality aspects, objectives and general principles of data sharing as well as legal and technical safeguards which can be adopted to guarantee trust in further re-use are addressed.
The data inventory is the first attempt in RNE’s data ecosystem for classifying its non-personal data in a single place (i.e. data assets). Similarly, the IT service catalogue is a single point of reference for all RNE chargeable and non-chargeable services related to data exchange within and data sharing outside of the railway sector with their respective price tag (where applicable).
Here you can find the RNE Non-Personal Data Policy.