Brainstorming Session Recap

[Neil Freeman]

Thanks to everyone who came to the developers brainstorming session at
DOT on July 21. Here's a quick recap for those who couldn't come, or
weren't taking notes:

Dani Simons started with one of the underlying ideas of this
initiative: DOT has a ton of data, developers have the skills to make
great applications with that data.
Dani ran through the data feeds that DOT currently has up (http://a841-
dotweb01.nyc.gov/datafeeds/), as well as real time traffic aggregators
that DOT feeds into (http://www.511ny.org/traffic.aspx http://www.xcm.org/).
Dani also covered a few other data sources that aren't quite public
yet: "emergency" response emails, which alert to street closings, and
the CECM (http://www.nyc.gov/html/cecm/html/home/home.shtml) database
of street closures.

We then opened up the discussion, including the following issues:

* Taxi data. Real time data isn't available, but they do provide a
record of 70 million trips a year, mostly in the Manhattan CBD. This
data is the province of the TLC (www.nyc.gov/tlc).

* The importance of picking a model for sharing data, for instance as
a feed, or as a geographically-based subscription.

* The necessity and difficulty of knowing when a street closure event
is over. The agencies and utilities that do roadwork often request a
larger window than they need for work, which means that automated data
might not reflect the reality.

* The possibilities of using historic data to model traffic, which is
what Cabsense is doing with taxi data to recommend spots to hail a
cab. Historic trolley data was requested, although DOT probably
doesn't have any.

Suchitra Shetty gave an update on the Big Apps contest, which will
start again roughly this October, and finish at the end of 2010. Big
Apps is run by the NYC Economic Development Corp (www.nycedc.com),
which shows an awareness of how tech can foster and support economic
growth.

Other issues discussed:

* The usefulness of pedestrian counts
* The potential of an API for interacting with DOT (or citywide) data.
* The legal status of DOT data - it's generally in the public domain,
although subject to licenses that focus on liability.
* The need for a continued conversation, hence this group.

I look forward to talking more and continuing this converation!

-Neil Freeman
nfre...@dot.nyc.gov

[siculars]

Hi Neil and group members,

I wasn't able to make it to the event the other day but I want to
thank the DOT for engaging the community. As for the items you pointed
out, let me add my thoughts:

- Sharing data. I would argue on behalf of a streaming feed. Might I
invoke something akin to twitter? Unless the geographical subscription
could be done via some inheritance. For instance, if you subscribe to
the NYC feed you get all the boroughs. But you may also subscribe to
just a borough and get only that. I think that method is far more
difficult to implement. A feed with geographic tags embedded in it
would allow the developer to filter as needed.

-Street closure would be fantastic! A single authoritative feed that
aggregated all closures from any agency that has authority to stop
traffic. Would that be something the DOT _could_ do? At this point I
would settle for an authoritative feed with known start and stop times
regardless of when the street is actually reopened. Apologies if this
is already covered somewhere and if so, would someone point me in the
right direction?

One last word on format. Of the resources you make available in xml,
may I throw my two cents behind json. If I had a vote I would dump
everything in json.

Thank you,
Alexander

On Jul 21, 3:46 pm, Neil Freeman <nfree...@dot.nyc.gov> wrote:
> Thanks to everyone who came to the developers brainstorming session at
> DOT on July 21. Here's a quick recap for those who couldn't come, or
> weren't taking notes:
>
> Dani Simons started with one of the underlying ideas of this
> initiative: DOT has a ton of data, developers have the skills to make
> great applications with that data.
> Dani ran through the data feeds that DOT currently has up (http://a841-
> dotweb01.nyc.gov/datafeeds/), as well as real time traffic aggregators

> that DOT feeds into (http://www.511ny.org/traffic.aspxhttp://www.xcm.org/).

> nfree...@dot.nyc.gov