[Open-transport] Next steps for Open Transport (was: Open Transport Data tools / webservices)

[Pieter Colpaert]

Hi all,

Thanks for a lot of very interesting replies. There are a couple of 
interesting projects I didn't know about and it has helped to create a 
better overview of what is still lacking.

As a community/working group at OKFN we should take a couple of steps 
forward. There are 2 steps that I see as potentially very helpful:

1. Creating a transit vocabulary which everyone can use

This is not an API and this is not a format. It's just agreeing on the 
words we will use to describe things in any of the systems we will 
create. It is creating a semantic model. As I've heard now, this 
vocabulary should be inspired by GTFS and Transmodel.

How about creating a separate mailing list which talks about specifying 
this vocabulary? A very nice starting point I believe would be 
http://vocab.org/transit/terms/.html by Ian Davis which is inspired by 
GTFS at this moment.

2. Creating a knowledge center on transit stops

I would love to have one knowledge center which can identify all things 
according to the vocabulary and where users can add data about these 
things that matter for route planning and other transport use cases in 
particular (a couple of concrete examples that this should fix: what is 
the walking distance to get the train if you arrive by bus, how many 
stairs are there in between the taxi stop and the thalys stop and would 
I be able to get my connection with a wheelchair, what parking lots are 
open at this moment and are located near a tram stop that goes towards 
the center of a city, and so on).

And good news. I have registered the perfect domain name: 
http://stations.io.

As Rufus mentioned, I would love to start a github repository on our 
open transport organization group over here: 
https://github.com/OpenTransport and start discussing how that should 
look like.

Kind regards,

Pieter