Neil J. Pedersen

State Highway Administrator
Maryland Department of Transportation

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“The issue of workforce retention, workforce turnover, and loss of knowledge as a result of that turnover of experienced staff [is] the number one issue of concern to me. To the extent that knowledge networks can be an effective tool in trying to address that issue, it becomes a tool that’s addressing my number one priority.”

Robert C. Johns

Director, Center for Transportation Studies
University of Minnesota

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“Innovators always want to know what the latest is, they thirst for information. Having the capability to access what’s going on, whether it’s in research or whether it’s in best practices, is tremendously important for them to help create their own approaches in their own organizations. Transportation Knowledge Networks are very important to provide information to be able to learn what others are doing to grapple with these questions.”

Maureen Hammer

Knowledge Management Officer
Virginia Department of Transportation

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“The ability to tap into information and experts across organizations provides them [employees] with an invaluable link to those needed resources. You need that expert knowledge network to tap into and you need that additional documentation that’s been gathered so that we can learn from each other. ... Last year we received a 250% ROI on just three projects.”

Leni Oman

Director, Research & Library Services
Washington State Department of Transportation

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"One concern that I’ve heard about transportation knowledge networks is that people are afraid that we’re trying to build one centralized repository of information, and that’s not the case. We are trying to identify information resources within the transportation community, where they are, and to understand how they’re organized so that we can incorporate that information into a larger transportation network of information.

Another aspect of why I think a transportation network will help us with is providing information to the public about transportation. Transportation systems are complex and multi-modal and I don’t think that the development and management of those systems are very well understood by the public and that’s in large part because they don’t have easy information to turn to to improve their understanding of our world. So, it would be nice if we had a front door for the public to come through to get answers about transportation, be it a travel or information system and being able to find it in whatever state that they’re going to, or to try and break down information about transportation revenue and why it’s so darn hard to get project funding in their community. Or to find out what transportation is doing to minimize the impact that they have on the environment.

I think it’s really important to bring library science principles and standards into our concept of a transportation knowledge network. Library science has been around for a very long time and has ... developed better strategies for collecting, organizing, and cataloging information so that it can be found and then disseminated."

R. David Lankes

Associate Professor, School of Information Studies
Director, Information Institute of Syracuse, Syracuse University

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"When you look at information not as a series of documents, but as really the free flow of information that we can tap into and utilize for things we haven’t even imagined yet, what we need to build is an infrastructure that is equally fluid and creative....

We need to look at the interstate system from a couple of decades ago and say 'How do we build this information interstate system that really controls whole new uses in traffic that we never anticipated before?' We’re going to look at the information field and really tackle it with the same level of effort.

...

[The medical sector] invested in the deposits and repositories for information. If you go to the National Library of Medicine, you can see what the human genome looks like and you can find out every chromosome that’s on there, and that information is helpful to the person working on the next cure for cancer as well as the cancer patient.

And so ... they have a common infrastructure, they share this information, no one organization could afford to produce it itself, but it’s having real dramatic benefits in [commerce, regulation, treatments, and patient awareness.]

[The medical sector has] really benefited from this concept of building distributed knowledge networks, and I think when we look at transportation, it’s just ripe for an innovator to come in and talk about how information can radically change the way that we move people, goods, and services around this country.

This vision of building a cooperative information network is different from the Internet itself. In other words, it’s not just enough to take all the digital data that we have and give it a URL and pop it on the Net and say 'good luck.' There is work that needs to go into prioritizing that information and finding that information. Just putting it online and searching Google isn’t good enough.

Ultimately, what the transportation knowledge network as I see it, is a really immense great opportunity of innovation."