[open-government] Who is hacking on transport data?

[Peter Hicks]

On 11/11/11 21:33, Daniel Dietrich wrote:
> If you are a transport data hacker, if you are crunching transport
> data bites or having trubles getting the data you need to develop a
> cool transport data application, please contact me or point me in the
> direction of people doing so.
That'll be me then!  Thank you to Lucy Chambers for pointing me over here.

I'm working to free up rail data in the UK.  I have been reasonably 
successful on a small scale - Network Rail have given me feeds of data 
from their systems - timetables, signalling data, real-time movement 
data based off the signalling data, short-term planned alterations and 
speed restrictions.  Once those data sets are out there, I want to work 
on fares data.

I'm writing a Ruby on Rails application, TSDBExplorer, to process this 
data, as it's incredibly raw and requires a heck of a lot of work to 
interpret.  Source code is at https://github.com/poggs/tsdbexplorer if 
anyone wants to look.

Scaling this up is going to be a challenge, as NR use IBM WebSphere MQ 
as their enterprise messaging platform.  They want me to use an MQ 
Server if I want a full feed - licence costs are astronomical, so I'm 
taking a partial feed and using the free client instead.  I'm looking 
for creative ways around it.

I am more than happy to talk to anyone about the project, including 
taking part in hackdays, presenting, etc.


Peter