STB launches Open Data Portal with Huwise technology

The Surface Transportation Board has launched a beta Open Data Portal built with Huwise technology to make rail service datasets easier to access, analyze, and share. The move gives researchers, industry users, and the public centralized machine-readable data and basic visualizations as the agency expands its open-government push.

Why it matters: - The Surface Transportation Board’s new portal can make federal rail service data easier to use for researchers, industry stakeholders, and the public. - Centralized machine-readable access can reduce the time needed to work with data that was previously limited to weekly spreadsheets. - The portal is designed to support both human analysis and AI-driven workflows, including export to preferred analytical platforms and large language models.

What happened: - Huwise announced that its technology has been deployed by the Surface Transportation Board as part of the agency’s data modernization effort. - The deployment underpins the STB Open Data Portal, which is currently available in beta. - The portal is live at the STB Open Data Portal.

The details: - The Surface Transportation Board is the U.S. federal agency responsible for economic regulation of surface transportation, primarily freight rail. - The STB has jurisdiction over railroad rate, practice, and service issues, plus rail restructuring transactions including mergers, line sales, line construction, and line abandonments. - The portal centralizes access to machine-readable data and converts information from weekly spreadsheets into a more user-friendly format. - The portal includes basic visualizations of key service metrics such as cars online and train speed. - The beta version currently focuses on EP 724 rail service data. - The STB plans to expand the portal over time to include all public data collected by the agency. - The agency also plans to improve the visualizations available to the public. - Huwise’s marketplace-style platform is built to increase data consumption and value through secure, compliant self-service access. - Huwise says the system is intended to serve both employees and external users with data in the right formats for human and AI use.

Between the lines: - The portal signals a shift from static reporting toward a more interactive public data model. - Better formatting and visualization can make transportation oversight data more usable without changing the underlying information. - The emphasis on AI-ready exports suggests the agency is thinking beyond public browsing and toward broader reuse of its datasets. - Huwise framed the portal as a way to simplify sharing and build a stronger collaborative ecosystem around data.

What's next: - The STB plans to broaden the portal beyond EP 724 to cover all public data it collects. - The agency expects to add more and better visualizations as the portal develops. - Broader rollout will determine how much the beta model changes day-to-day access to STB data for outside users.