Help with SIRI for Simple Web Services Proposal
Michael Frumin
All,
As you may be aware, MTA Bus Time has the first (as far as I'm aware) transit developer API that uses a true open standard, which is to say SIRI (http://bustime.mta.info/wiki/Developers/SIRIIntro). That said, we had to informally extend the specification a little bit to make it work for developers, most importantly making it RESTful. Also, as a bonus, we return data in JSON as well as XML format.
SIRI has a committee meeting on March 22. The committee has agreed to consider a proposal to formally include some of what we have done in terms of RESTful request/response and non-XML encodings as an extension called “SIRI for Simple Web Services.” I’m writing to ask for help drafting that proposal, the first version of which needs to be done by the end of February.
At Transportation Camp DC I met up with Nick Knowles (who hosts http://www.kizoom.com/standards/siri/ and is on the SIRI Committee) and we agreed on the general structure and content of the proposal. It seems to have a good chance of being seriously considered and hopefully accepted. It just needs to be written. I think it can be quite concise, maybe 5-10 pages at most.
I’ve thrown up a google doc with the skeleton of the proposal at https://docs.google.com/document/d/1fPUQ1vS6RUjci7EJY_Aaf-W_Ul38lY43INf8VETeE88/edit so if anyone wants to help it would be greatly appreciated. The doc is supposedly world-writeable, but if anyone has problems accessing lemme know and I can share with you directly.
Please let me know if you think you might be able to help, or whether I’m just crazy.
Thanks,
Mike
PS before we start a raging debate about SIRI vs GTFS-realtime, please take a look at the section in the aforelinked document called "Comparison with GTFS-Realtime." My feeling is that they are for very different uses and thus the standards themselves cannot be compared. Rather, the debate if there is one should be about the general use cases for real time transit API's.
Sean Barbeau
correct URL for Google Doc:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1fPUQ1vS6RUjci7EJY_Aaf-W_Ul38lY43INf8VETeE88/edit