[iRail] iRail 3.0 roadmap - request for volunteers

Sun Jul 22 10:32:42 UTC 2012

Hi all,

During iRail Summer of code we've had enough time to brainstorm about
the roadmap for the next year, and this is what we've come up with:

iRail 3.0 will connect your social network to your mobility experience.
For a lot of people, the biggest part of their day is being on the road.
Whether that means you’re on public or private transport, it doesn’t
matter: it can become more fun, more social and more easy.

iRail 3.0 is a roadmap with different products as an end-result:
 * https://id.iRail.be will be launched as an identity manager and
authenticator for all iRail products
 * http://data.iRail.be will be launched as a web-service which returns
information about different kinds of transport, on top of a data
harvesting mechanism
 * a new version of iRail.be will be built, which combines all previous
work in a simple user interface.

Where do we need help?

1. https://id.iRail.be and PlugID
----------------------------------

PlugID is an OAuth proxy written in PHP5.3 using CodeIgniter. It allows
you to connect your identity with different social networks. It is both
an OAuth client as a server. There is support for OAuth 1.0 and OAuth 2

https://id.iRail.be is a PlugID instance which will become the single
sign-on system for all applications developed at iRail, once it is stable.

For now, Lennart, Jens, Koen and Hannes have put a lot of effort in this
already. There are still some issues to be resolved and the
user-experience can become a lot better still. You can help out at
http://github.com/iRail/PlugID

2. http://data.iRail.be and The DataTank
------------------------------------------

Our web-service at data.iRail.be is written in PHP5.3 using The
DataTank. The DataTank is a web-service framework developed at iRail.
You can contribute to The DataTank at http://github.com/iRail/The-DataTank

On the github page of iRail there are different repositories for
different resources at http://data.iRail.be. For the NMBS, the
connections API still has to be finnished and there is still a lot of
data lacking. You can help out by writing The DataTank resources.

3. A data harvester
--------------------

We will start writing a dataharvester to collect all data. This way we
can do data journalism, keep statistics, do predictions, and most
importantly, do a constant amount of requests each day with our scrapers
(as we can now program the The DataTank resources to use this data
cluster instead of proxying each request).

Hannes is doing this as part of his thesis, which will end in december.
You can find more information about his thesis here:
http://hannes.iRail.be. It would be great if you could help him out.

4. iRail.be
-------------

The new version of iRail.be will be the first journey planner with full
interaction with your social network: "check in on a train". It will
give you easy access to the data in data.iRail.be and it will use the
identity information stored at id.iRail.be.

The team behind iRail.be:
 * Creative mind: Miet Claes
 * Graphic mind: Dennis Kestelle
 * Information Architect: Rosemie Callewaert
 * Back-end coupling: Hannes Van De Vreken
 * Front-end coding: you?

Keep calm and travel on,

Pieter

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iRail vzw/asbl
+32 (0) 486/747122