transiki, new transit data project

[Joe Hughes]

Steve Coast of OSM/CloudMade has just launched a new project around
transit data—here's the initial blog post/manifesto:
http://blog.transiki.org/why-transiki

It's good to see some new energy aimed at the problem of aggregating
transit data; I'm interested to see where this goes.

Joe

[William Lachance]

2010/10/18 Joe Hughes <joe.hug...@gmail.com>:

I hate to be negative, but I'm pretty skeptical. For agencies that
have open data at least, a HTTP link to a GTFS feed on the data
exchange seems like a perfectly web-service API to me. From my
perspective as someone who writes systems that consume this
information, there are a few big problems that remain to be solved:

1. No standardized format for providing real-time information and
updates. The publicly available nextbus API seems a step in this
direction though.
2. The tools available for processing and analyzing GTFS information
still aren't 100% there: they're python-only, and the popular one
(googletransitfeed) is kind of slow. I think the solution here has
been identified
(http://groups.google.com/group/transit-developers/msg/45d55400130459e9),
it's mostly just a matter of sitting down and doing the work required.

On the other hand, I don't see how putting things into a wiki-like
structure helps to solve either of these problems. Am I missing
something?

The only real use case I can see for something like this would be as a
centralized repository of user corrections and additions to agency
data. Having dealt with crappily annotated or just plain wrong GTFS
information, I can confirm this is a real need, but I'm not 100% sure
how urgent it is.
--
William Lachance
wrl...@gmail.com

[Kieran Huggins]

Will++

I'd like to see more effort put into solidifying the agency APIs themselves.

Kevin and I have started noodling about with real-time data, and we'll likely release something @ http://myttc.ca/developers after a healthy dose of testing.

Cheers,
Kieran

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[Jehiah Czebotar]

> The only real use case I can see for something like this would be as a
> centralized repository of user corrections and additions to agency
> data. Having dealt with crappily annotated or just plain wrong GTFS
> information, I can confirm this is a real need, but I'm not 100% sure
> how urgent it is.

I've also dealt with needing to post-process gtfs file for quite a
number of agencies (as i'm sure a lot of people have) and one of the
goals of gtfs-data-exchange.com is to allow developers to upload those
sort of modifications as their own gtfs files. Some of that isn't
handled perfectly today on the site but if you are interested in
contributing to gtfs-data-exchange drop me a line.

--
Jehiah