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

[ding c. (cd8e10)]

Hi all,
Sorry for disturbing. I am a first year PhD student at the University of Southampton, UK, with the research interest in the use of Open Data for accessibility. I am also new to open transport community. As my current review of open transport data, there are very rare data related to accessibility. Although there are a list of current applications provides the accessible transport data, there are various formats and data structure. As inspired by Pieter' email, in my opinion, the open transport data should also involve the accessibility data in both a common transit vocabulary and a knowledge center for transit stops. transport authorities, city councils or volunteers could contribute to this knowledge center, and everyone could use it.

Kind regards
Chaohai Ding

PhD Research Student
Web and Internet Science Group (WAIS)
School of Electronics and Computer Science
University of Southampton
mailto: cd8e10 at ecs.soton.ac.uk

________________________________________
From: open-transport-bounces at lists.okfn.org [open-transport-bounces at lists.okfn.org] on behalf of Pieter Colpaert [pieter.colpaert at okfn.org]
Sent: 16 July 2013 13:36
To: open-transport at lists.okfn.org
Subject: [Open-transport] Next steps for Open Transport (was: Open Transport    Data tools / webservices)

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

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