ITSO are the guardian of the ITSO Specification, which aims to make travelling on public transport throughout the UK seamless and easier by enabling smart ticketing technology. 

The ITSO community is a membership of public sector authorities, transport operators and equipment and solution suppliers to the smart ticketing industry, who use the ITSO Specification to deliver smart, integrated and interoperable ticketing across Great Britain.

The serial number encoded on a smart card but not known to a customer.

The central system which holds information about everyone’s smart cards. HOPS automates many of the complex daily tasks of a smart transport ticketing scheme including transaction processing and asset management.

A data specification that allows public transport operators to publish their transit data in a format that can be consumed by a wide variety of software applications. Today, the GTFS data format covers both static and real-time data and is used by thousands of public transport providers.

You can learn more about the GTFS specification in detail at GTFS.org and at developers.google.com/transit.

GTFS was originally written by Google and is similar to the TransXChange and SIRI formats used widely in the UK. Many public transport operators release this data as open data. A good source of GTFS data in the UK is Passenger’s open data portal.

AVL systems provide the GPS coordinates of where a vehicle physically is with some periodicity (e.g. every 30 seconds). These require vehicles to be equipped with a GPS receiver and mobile broadband connection. The location is sent to a central server, which then provides a live feed, usually a SIRI-VM feed, for all vehicles.

A grant paid to operators of eligible bus services and community transport organisations to help them recover some of their fuel costs. The amount each bus operator receives is based on their annual fuel consumption.

BSOG also benefits passengers by:

• helping operators keep fares down
• enabling operators to run services that might otherwise be unprofitable and could lead to cancellation.

ETMs are machines with computer processors and memory which issue tickets for travel. ETMs are either designed for in-vehicle use, as fixed or handheld units, or for use at stations and other off-bus locations in the form of electronic kiosks.  In-vehicle fixed electronic ticket machines (ETM) are most commonly used on bus services, although they can also be used on other transport services.

The Domain Name System is the phonebook of the internet. Each device connected to the internet has a unique IP address which other machines use to find the device. DNS servers eliminate the need for us to memorise IP addresses such as 192.168.123.1

Software that facilitates creating, editing, organising and publishing content. Drupal and WordPress are examples of Content Management Systems that allow you to create and publish content on the Internet.

A software cache stores data so that future requests for that data can be served faster; the data stored in a cache is the result of an earlier request for the same data which is then stored locally or somewhere along the network, such as a router or switch network device. The more requests that can be served from the cache, the faster the system performs.