The Icelandic Road and Coastal Administration (IRCA) has as of March 2021 started to broadcast road condition, weather data and situations in accordance with the EU’s DATEXII standard version 3 defined in the multi-part CEN standard 16157. DATEX II is an European standard that many European countries use to broadcast their traffic information data. The standard simplifies how traffic information is distributed, as it unifies how the data is modelled and structured, and makes it accessible for third party service providers, such as Google Maps, HERE, TomTom and Inrix.
IRCA hopes that the broadcasting of its traffic information on DATEX II, will help ensure that critical information will reach commuters where and when they need it, and will also help improve route selection and optimization.
Following severe winter storms in Iceland in December 2019 and January 2020, IRCA was allocated additional state funding to improve information to commuters. IRCA has for a long time made it a priority to provide good traffic information for commuters, with emphasis on winter conditions. IRCA has made this information available digitally on its website, on the teletext Textavarpið, through an automatic phone service and through an API. With adding the DATEX II broadcast, IRCA’s goal is to deliver its traffic information straight to car’s navigation systems and commuter’s smartphones. The DATEX II service will help IRCA to ensure the safety of commuters in Iceland and help prevent driving on closed roads.
The services available support snapshot PULL via HTTP Get and SOAP according to DATEX II exchange 2020 specification. This means that you can request information on demand.
Currently five different DATEX II services are available:
| Service | Publication | Description |
| Point Incidents | SituationPublication | Returns current point events. |
| Road conditions | SituationPublication | Returns current road conditions on predefined locations (sections). |
| Road condition sections | PredefinedLocations | Returns all predefined road condition sections. |
| Measurement sites | MeasurementSitePublication | Returns all defined measurement sites. A measurement site is a meteorological data station. |
| Measurement date | MeasurementDataPublication | Returns all current/latest measurement data values on Measurement sites. |
Point Incidents These services provide information on road incidents. Incidents use point coordinates and OpenLR Point as the location referencing system. Road Conditions Road conditions provide information on a predefined section of the road. The road condition always exists and is regularly updated when it changes. Road condition sections The road condition sections give all predefined sections used by the road condition service. Each road condition section is defined by one or more segment defined as a GML LineString and OpenLR Linear. Measurement sites The measurement site services return all available measurement sites, including the type of measurement point each site has, which indicates what type of data it measures. Each measurement site has a coordinate as Location and an OpenLR Point. Measurement data The measurement data service returns the latest measurement values at each measurement site.
For more technical details, see the IRCA_DATEXII_3_1_Specification and browse http://datex.vegagerdin.is/ website for any updates.