[iRail] train statistics

[Pieter Colpaert]

Hi Jonathan,

On Mon, 2011-01-24 at 15:46 +0000, jonathan orban wrote:
> What about recording all the data generated by infrabel? I would see 3
> direct applications that would be very valuable for all travelers:

Yes, that's one of our plans for February. You summed up exactly what we
are going to do. The timeframe that I see is that we should go 'alpha'
in March. We will provide historical data through the same API and same
calls. At this moment when you search for < +-2 weeks it will generate
an error message.

The database that we are going to set-up will be available to use for
anyone. We will also ask treinvertragingen.be for their data of the past
2 years.

Are you interested in helping?

> 
> Questions:
> Is it allowed to record such data?

Yes. The data according to the second database law is not copyrighted.

> How difficult would that be technically?

It needs a lot of thinking: what needs to be saved into a database? Only
the realtime information of that day? And does that need to be saved per
hour/per minute or per vehicle that day? We don't need to save the
static data for each day since that data doesn't change every year. We
do however need to take into account that this static data changes in
2013 and has already changed a couple of times in the past;

This is an engineering problem for February and I'm sure we will figure
this out. As we have already written the real-time API, gathering the
information itself is not difficult at al.

> How much data would that generate per day?

Needs to be checked. But if we would save the delay of each train
between two stations, multiplied by the number of trains and stops - 1
the trains make, you can get an idea ;-)

> How much would it cost to record the data and save it on a server?

We will do that with the NPO (vzw/asbl). So it will not cost you
anything.
> 
Pieter

P.S. Don't forget the second of February we are doing an iRail meetup.
If then you want to support iRail you can become a member of the NPO
(working member: for free and we protect your copyright, supporting
member: annual fee)