ITO World will tomorrow be previewing a radical new data visualisation tool it is developing for transport professionals at a major industry event in Milton Keynes.

The two-week Imagine Festival, which opened on Monday, has been organised by the Government’s Transport Systems Catapult initiative to explore the concept of “intelligent mobility” within the future of transport policy and planning.

Tomorrow, Ipswich-based ITO World, a specialist in data visualisation, will be revealing the first details of a new business intelligence aid developed to help planners, policy makers, operators and modelers understand how transport networks function at present, how they have performed in the past and how they might operate in the future.

The platform, which will be available to the industry later this year, will provide transport professionals with the power to interrogate and explore big datasets, visualise models, identify and report key trends, explore and diagnose causal factors and report on and share the resulting insights gained.

A demonstration of some of the tool’s capabilities will feature in a video being shown at the festival, presenting real-time, “action replay” and infographic views of the strategic road network ? the results of the initial stage of a collaboration between ITO World and the Transport Systems Catapult.

ITO World, a member of the EADT’s Future50 listing of high growth potential businesses, was established in Ipswich in 2006 by transport information systems specialist Peter Miller and film visual effects expert Hal Bertram with the aim of applying technology from the film and computer gaming industries to provide insights into how transport networks function.

Mr Miller, chief executive of ITO World, says the new platform will aid future transport planning and policymaking by making complex data sets easier to understand and communicate and simpler to act on.

“Doing more with data is key to the successful development of intelligent mobility, and creation of smart cities,” he said. “Our visualisation tools are helping to make sense of all this data and deliver data-driven insight and real-time business intelligence in a simple engaging way.

“That’s why ITO is attracting so much attention from organisations that have significant commercial and economic interests in understanding traffic, movement across modes, network connectivity, congestion, asset management and safety ? particularly as there is an increasingly overwhelming amount of data available to understand”.

Other clients of ITO World include Google, for which it prepared the data underlying the recent launch of a new maps app which includes details of public transport links across the whole of Great Britain, and operators such as FirstGroup, Abellio and Stagecoach.