[Open-transport] Canada's VIA Rail

[Daniel Rudmark]

Hi Richard, Hannes, Peter and everyone on the list,
My name is Daniel Rudmark and I work as a researcher within the Viktoria 
Institute, Gothenburg, Sweden. Daniel Dietrich pointed me this list and 
I look forward to participating in future discussions.

Through Viktoria, I've come to be involved in something called 
trafiklab.se, a community and API platform between a variety of traffic 
actors (public transit companies, municipalities, private actors or any 
other entity wanting to expose open data related to personal 
transportation), developers and other stakeholders such as researchers. 
Currently there are around 10 organisations present, some 20 API's 
available and more than 600 developers which have subscribed to the 
platform.

> I only knew of two national-level train open data efforts, from
> France's SNCF and the UK's ATOC, if there are others please let me
> know or add them in the comments.

A short backdrop on open train data in Sweden: Through trafiklab.se we 
are currently working together with the train division of the National 
Traffic Authority and leading developers in this area to design open 
API's containing data on stations, routes and real-time information 
(such as delays and disturbance information). As a pilot we will release 
simple REST-based API's supporting the most common use cases among 
developers. As of today time-tables are already open and free of charge. 
However, there is also a need to implement data provision through more 
standardised datasets, conforming to train data standards to enable 
extending services beyond Sweden and to enable more complex service 
development. As an example Google Transit has expressed a great interest 
in implementing real-time train data in their service if data were to be 
exposed in a more standardised manner.

I'm very interested to hear how other train-related 
authorities/organisations throughout Europe has reasoned about the data 
format. I've heard both SIRI and GTFS being mentioned but really not the 
rationale to support any of these. If anyone on this list has any 
insights to share on these matters I would greatly appreciate it! Also, 
if you have any questions on open traffic data in Sweden you are most 
welcome to contact me.

/Daniel