TÃœBITAK joins the OSPT Alliance

MUNICH, GERMANY: Continuing to build momentum as its membership grows, the Open Standard for Public Transport Alliance (OSPT) announced that the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TÃœBITAK) has joined the OSPT Alliance as an associate member.

Through its membership in the Alliance, this national research and standards agency is lending its support to the CIPURSE Open Security Standard as a key component of public transportation and other applications in their country.

"CIPURSE offers the advantages of a platform-independent, open specification that can be applied not only to public transportation applications, but also more broadly for national eID and various access control applications," said a senior executive at TÃœBITAK-BILGEM. "We are pleased to join the OSPT Alliance and participate in this organization to support the implementation of this open security standard."

The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TÃœBITAK) is the leading agency for management, funding and research in Turkey. It was established in 1963 with a mission to advance science and technology, conduct research and support Turkish researchers. TÃœBITAK-BILGEM has Turkey's largest R&D staff focused on information technologies, information security and advanced electronics.

"We welcome TÃœBITAK-BILGEM to the OSPT Alliance and look forward to working with them to ensure their success with the CIPURSE open security standard," said Laurent Cremer, executive director for the OSPT Alliance. "The announcement again demonstrates the growing number of major national agencies around the world who are lending their support to the CIPURSE standard for a variety of public transportation and other security applications."

The CIPURSE open security standard addresses the need by local and regional transit authorities for future-proof fare collection systems with more advanced security than currently in use. Because it is an open standard, CIPURSE promotes vendor neutrality, cross-vendor system interoperability, lower technology adoption risks, higher quality and improved market responsiveness, all of which result in lower operating costs and greater flexibility for transport system operators.