Mapping of Hyderabad Bus Stops and Routes

[Nikhil VJ]

H folks, pls connect with GIS people in Hyderabad.

--
Cheers,
Nikhil VJ
+91-966-583-1250
Pune, India
http://nikhilvj.co.in

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Surya Kandukuri <su...@factly.in>
Date: Thu, Dec 6, 2018 at 4:36 PM

TSRTC is one of largest transit agencies with one of the densest networks in the country. A complex coordination between 4,749 buses across 29 depots are carried out every day to help 3.3 million commuters navigate across urban and peri-urban parts of the city.

 

In an attempt to create an ecosystem that enables ground-up innovations and interventions to make services of TSRTC more accessible, the Telangana Open Data Unit and the WRI have been engaged with the agency over the last eight months in a mammoth effort to open its commuter facing data in GTFS. As a part of this initiative, we have been working with the IT department and depot representatives to document, clean, map and comprehend different data sets and understand how services are planned. Prior attempts to digitize bus data by other stakeholders have been extremely useful and informed much of our thinking. We now have a repository of more than 2 Lakh stop entries (with repeats) and 7000 geospatial points.

 

We think we have a rich source of data that is current and comprehensive, but there lies much work ahead. We would like to invite members of GIS community for a sit-down and brainstorming session where we can share our experience and learnings from this exercise and seek for more collaborative ideas to organize this data and create a reliable comprehensive database that can be made open. We would like to especially invite folks who have worked in a professional capacity in mapping urban transport. Hyderabad is India's hub of geospatial industry and we would love for more brains to help with this exercise

 

When: 9^th December 2018, 11:00 AM to 1:00 PM

Where: Swecha Foundation, Gachibowli

What do you need?

- Basic understanding of mapping, GIS

- Familiarity with places in and around Hyderabad

- Laptops (If Possible)

 

For any queries, please reach out to

Nikhil @ +91 9665831250

Surya @ +91 9633214289

============================================================

[Koltur Raghavender Rao]

Hi Guys,

I am very much interested to work in this project..I would defintely want to part of meeting.

Thanks for the invitation.

Thanks,

K Raghavender Rao

--
Datameet is a community of Data Science enthusiasts in India. Know more about us by visiting http://datameet.org
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "datameet" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to datameet+u...@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

--

K. Raghavender Rao

+91 9866079246

[Nikhil VJ]

Meetup link: https://www.meetup.com/swechafsmi/events/257026328/

[Srihari Thalla]

How did it go, Nikhil? 

On Fri, Dec 7, 2018, 14:24 Nikhil VJ <nikh...@gmail.com wrote:

Meetup link: https://www.meetup.com/swechafsmi/events/257026328/

[Nikhil VJ]

Hi Srihari,

Session was good! Our main purpose was to announce about the project and invite the larger GIS community in Hyderabad to come in and get involved, share ideas or even take up some tasks if they feel inclined. So that invite remains open - pls contact me on me [at] nikhilvj.co.in if anyone wants to get involved and is ready for grunt work (I prefer Hyderabad-based folks because you'll need to know those places, but there are opportunities for folks outside too).

I'm very excited about the possibility of detecting common patterns between the routes, suggested by one of the participants whose group works with Random Forest. If we can bring common pattern detection and editing to routes management it'll mean a major time-saving in editing routes. (Example use case: one more stop is added between two existing ones. The change should get rippled across all the routes/trips that ply there.)

I've copied links gathered at the session and written some detailed explanations on this swecha forum post (finally seeing a discourse forum that's India-specific), will follow up over there with more stuff so follow it there. The data entry and route mapping apps we've developed can be applied to other places too. I haven't published their code yet, hope to do so soon.

https://discuss.swecha.org/t/9-dec-18-session-on-bus-routes-mapping-project-for-hyderabad/218

Regards

Nikhil VJ

Pune, India

[Nikhil VJ]

Hi Folks,

Apologies for the late post, but please share this with your friends in Hyderabad. We're conducting a Mapathon for mapping Hyderabad's Bus Routes.

5th, 6th Jan 2019, JNTU College, 10am to 6pm. Participants can also come on just one of the days.

Direct link to poster: https://i.imgur.com/7dvSfIt.jpg

Regards

Nikhil VJ, Pune, India

[Nikhil VJ]

Hi Friends, 

We had a great mapping session yesterday. Most valuable was the tacit local information of the participants.

We're changing venue and timings today :

6th Jan : continuation of Hyderabad Bus Routes mapping and discussion about project

3rd Floor, Abhyaas (opp JNTU gate, behind ICICI bank)

1pm to 6pm (break around 3pm)

Regards

Nikhil VJ

[Nikhil VJ]

Hi Folks,

TL;DR : Exciting data challenges at bottom!

Following up here after a lot has happened!

We've done quite a bit of mapping and are at a point now where the remaining unmapped portions can use some attention from people who know Hyderabad like the back of their hand.

So reaching out to such folks: Inviting you to review the routes on our work-site: https://server.nikhilvj.co.in/payanam/ .

There's a bunch of pages - please use the top menu to navigate. (and please see the site from a wide screen and not a cell phone! It's a work-site! :P ). I won't get into explaining it all here but will advise the curious to play around like a naughty kid and click everything once or twice before reaching back with queries.

If you know where some of these missing stops are supposed to be, or if a route has something entered wrong, then please let me know.  Do check out the Map page where you can have a birds-eye view. You can contact me on nikhil.js [at] gmail.com or 9665831250.

-----------------

DATA CHALLENGES

We have some exciting challenges for the data, programming and GIS whizzes out there (no need to be from Hyd for this):

- Visualize our metrics over time : https://server.nikhilvj.co.in/payanam/reports/stats.json : snazziest one gets officially embedded and featured, and don't give me simple stuff : I did that already.

- Find common patterns: If each trip is represented as a word/string with each unique stop being three letters (26^3 - who knew you could encode so much in 3 letters!), then can you detect the common substrings? Data: https://server.nikhilvj.co.in/payanam/reports/route_patterns.csv

Expanding on this a bit: We want to know which routes have A > B > C > D pattern in common, in that order and not jumbled up. And don't bother with permutations-combinations : I ran a script doing that for 11 days straight on a server and didn't get far because there's gazillions of common patterns in 4000+ stops!

- Detect all clusters of stops from a large data-bank that are located just X meters from each other. (contact for getting set up with the data)

- Given a route of stops and a data-bank of existing stops, find the stops that might also be on that route. (contact for getting set up with the data)

- Generate on-road paths of the routes using the stops as waypoints. The resulting data must be copyright-free. (contact for getting set up with the data)

---------

PS: For those reading this thread first time : This is a joint project by World Resources Institute and Telangana Open Data Portal - interns may apply for any of the above mentioned tasks, but note that it'll be in this "just take it and do it" challenge format and not spoon-feeding / teaching format (Dude if I already knew, I'd finish this stuff myself!)

Regards

Nikhil VJ, Pune, India