Freight Data Warehouse

About

The Freight Data Warehouse (FDW), founded in 2021, addresses the long-standing need to make private freight data accessible for evidence-based research enhance the transportation of commodities in the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area. It consolidates, manages, and distributes freight data in a secure environment to enable freight analytics, modeling, monitoring and research, and to ensure freight data confidentiality and security requirements of providers. This is done by integrating data from a variety of sources including several telematics providers and will integrate marine, rail and border-crossing data, roadside interview data, shipper-based survey data, and other sources of freight data that become available over time.

You can access the Freight Data Warehouse using the following link: https://freightdatawarehouse.ca/

Objectives

The aim of the Freight Data Warehouse is to address three important goals:

• Host freight data securely
• Facilitate data access for approved entities (as per the Data Sharing Policy)
• Provide basic data visualizing and analytics services

Requesting access to Freight Data Warehouse

The FDW web portal provides the essential tools for SFC-affiliated researchers to create, submit, and manage their data download requests to the FDW. Currently, SFC-affiliated researchers can submit requests for HERE data using link IDs or GPS data provided by ATRI and SHAW.

SFC-affiliated researchers may request FDW access by emailing: fdw@smartfreightcentre.ca.

Data Sources

Transport Canada

• HERE Inc – Travel speeds by time of day by road segment
• ATRI – GPS traces of commercial vehicles

Other data sources

• Commercial Travel Survey data (shipper-based survey conducted by Metrolinx and University of Toronto)
• Others to be announced

Data Classification

Classification	Description
Public Data	Data that may be broadly distributed without causing a negative impact on data owners, SFC, or other stakeholders.
Internal Data	Data available to SFC researchers. Requires moderate aggregation or anonymization.
Restricted Data	Raw data that are highly confidential and may not be disclosed outside of a secure environment. Accessible via secure queries moderated by the Freight Data Warehouse steward.

Handling Areas

Areas	Description
Hosting Area	Restricted data. The hosting area is a secure data storage area, in which restricted (raw) data are stored. The hosting area is on a U of T private cloud server and is only accessible via approved queries that abide by the data policy.
Staging Area	Anonymized data for research. Resembles the restricted data, with modifications to preserve confidentiality. Allows SFC Researchers to understand the structure of the data, and to develop queries, which can then be used on the restricted data.
Web Portal	Online querying system. Allows data users to make data access requests and to view data that are approved for public viewing.