[iRail] Help needed: stationslist & wikipedia

Mon Aug 15 10:28:31 UTC 2011

Hello,

I think you misunderstood my request.
The station List is good, and I have nothing to complain.

The only issue is that asking for results in lang=en does not give 
accurate results if you are pinging 'Tournai' or 'Doornik'. (liveboard 
and connection)
The response should be in english (Doornik or Tournai, I really don't 
care), but the API should undersdand both name, that is not the 
currently the case with all cities (initial request with Sint genesius 
Rhode//Rhoide Saint Genese).

Hope this clarify my request.

> 	Pieter Colpaert <mailto:pieter.colpaert at gmail.com>
> 15 août 2011 11:50
>
>
> Hi,
>
> To summarize the problem that we're having:
>
> That list you showed us is what we currently have but the matching
> between railtime ID's, geocoordinates, NMBS ID's (these differ from
> railtime id's) and English names is really hard and currently a little
> buggy.
>
> Since the API also allows people to loosely match a station, such as
> give in "ghent" for Gent Sint Pieters, sometimes weird results are
> returned and that's the problem we're trying to fix.
>
> Christophe also wants a better stationslist returned at
> api.irail.be/stations/. Without parameter this list should not return a
> list of all stations with their English names (this list is the most
> buggy of all since there is no official "english" name), but it should,
> according to Christophe, return a list of all *stationnames* (not unique
> stations) which are different.
>
> For instance, if we have Charleroi ouest, returning charleroi west as
> well would be crazy since everyone can understand the stationname and it
> would be overhead to add it to an autocompletion list since it will only
> make it dirtier. If however we have Doornik, we also want to return
> Tournai, since these are 2 totally different names. Even for Oudenaarde
> this is an issue, since French users will start typing Aude...
>
> To be frank, I have broken my head over this the last year and the
> implementation we currently have is the best I could do. I think it's
> cool that now we are arguing about this because we may find a better
> solution.
>
> Your sincerely,
>
> Pieter
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> 	Tom Waterbley <mailto:t_waterbley at hotmail.com>
> 15 août 2011 10:36
>
>
> Why don't you try to parse this: 
> http://www.railtime.be/website/StationDataScript.ashx
>
> --------------------------------------------------
> From: "Pieter Colpaert" <pieter.colpaert at gmail.com>
> Sent: Monday, August 15, 2011 2:06 AM
> To: "iRail" <iRail at list.iRail.be>
> Subject: [iRail] Help needed: stationslist & wikipedia
>
> _______________________________________________
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> iRail at list.irail.be
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> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> 	Pieter Colpaert <mailto:pieter.colpaert at gmail.com>
> 15 août 2011 02:06
>
>
> Dear List,
>
> As Christophe brought to our attention earlier today we need a better
> stationslist @ http://api.iRail.be/stations/ . It really would be a
> shame if we would do double work or if we would keep all our efforts
> inside the NPO. I started thinking and now I came up with this solution:
>
> Wikipedia is pretty awesome. We got all (really, ALL) information that
> one could imagine about any (really, ANY) station on it! Check this out:
>
> http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat%C3%A9gorie:Gare_de_Belgique
> or
> http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categorie:Spoorwegstation_in_Belgi%C3%AB
>
> The English version however is not sufficient at all
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Railway_stations_in_Belgium
>
>
> DBPedia
> -------
> DBPedia is a system where you can query wikipedia as if it was a
> relational database. This means that we can just generate a stationslist
> by asking the right thing. I made a query:
>
> select *
> where {
> ?station a yago:RailwayStationsInBelgium
> OPTIONAL { ?station dbpprop:code ?code }
> OPTIONAL { ?station geo:lat ?lat }
> OPTIONAL { ?station geo:long ?long }
> }
>
> And put it into http://dbpedia.org/sparql
> Which gave this result: http://dbpedia.org/sparql?default-graph-uri=http
> %3A%2F%2Fdbpedia.org&query=select+*%0D%0Awhere+{%0D%0A%3Fstation+a+yago%
> 3ARailwayStationsInBelgium%0D%0AOPTIONAL+{+%3Fstation+dbpprop%3Acode+%
> 3Fcode+}%0D%0AOPTIONAL+{+%3Fstation+geo%3Alat+%3Flat+}%0D%0AOPTIONAL+{+%
> 3Fstation+geo%3Along+%3Flong+}%0D%0A}&debug=on&timeout=&format=text%
> 2Fhtml&save=display&fname=
>
> This would give us a HUGE amount of flexibility. By adding different
> parameters such as "?station dbpprop:abstract ?abstract" you can even
> get the history of a station.
>
>
> PROBLEM:
> ---------
>
> The data which dbpedia returns can only be retrieved from the English
> wikipedia. This means we will not have the great extended pages like on
> the Dutch or French version.
>
> However, if we, the iRail community, would just translate the Dutch or
> French pages into English, we solved our problem: we'd have a very good
> stationlist in our API. On top of that, we will also have made a lot of
> other people happy who would be trying to look up a wikipedia in English
> about a certain station.
>
> MISSION:
> --------
>
> Let's make this an iRail issue! Let's translate all pages into English!
> This would be a great achievement for our community.
>
> What do you think? Who's in?
>
> Yours sincerely,
>
> Pieter
>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------

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