[Open-transport] Wishes for Open Transit Data

Tue Apr 21 07:55:39 UTC 2015

On 21.04.2015 09:25, Pieter Colpaert wrote:

> Great job!

I do have to thank the community profoundly – the pad was instantly
filled with collaborators :)

> It's weird that the 5 stars are mentioned, but only the first 2 or 3
> stars are taken into account. For GTFS I have been creating Linked GTFS
> together with Andrew Byrd: http://vocab.gtfs.org, together with a script
> to convert regular gtfs to linked gtfs:
> https://github.com/OpenTransport/gtfs-csv2rdf. It's not perfect, but it
> does the trick.

Yes. And “not perfect, but does the trick” is nothing I see being put
forward by any German official institution, let alone a transit agency,
anytime in the near future :o)

I'd really _love_ having linked open data everywhere, ideally right now,
but I don't see this happening for German public transit – the current
battle is nudging agencies towards publishing open data in the first place.

_Then_ come the cool use cases we can show around and brag with, and
_then_ is the time when wishes for linked data will find open ears. I'd
rather have something to work with right now, with the community finding
out what could be improved in the future, than the old approach of
committees drafting standards at the drawing boards, ready for
publication in, maybe, three years ;)

> The problem is of course: do we want transit agencies to publish data as
> linked data today? My answer would be no: it's too early stage and no
> one is consuming this yet. Currently there's no need, but this need will
> be created when more and more gtfs files are published. It would be
> great to link towards Linked GTFS and say that this is how we envision
> the future of open transport data :)

You are right, the goal should definitely be mentioned in the document.
Care to open an issue? :D

regards,
-stk