[Open-transport] Coverage of GTFS-RT feeds in the world

[Stefan de Konink]

On Fri, 14 Oct 2016, Pieter Colpaert wrote:

> More context: the European Commission's DG Move wants to make the use of 
> Netex and Siri mandatory. Their reasoning is that GTFS-RT is too limited (I 
> think).

The European Commission by it self is narrow minded. How about funding a 
standard, let's call it NeTEx but if you ask for specific documentation 
you have to pay $500 euro to a *national* standard body. Or how about if 
quality of the examples is so poor that the original standard commitee 
just bluntly said that they didn't get money from CEN to support 
deployments. Why the hell did those people sign up to do the job in the 
first place?


> My current impression however of Siri and Netex is that these 2 
> specifications reinvent the wheel and their only small addition, the 
> definitions of certain words (the vocabulary), is not very user-friendly.

It is a reinventing the wheel of Transmodel put in an XML Schema. 
Implementing all European syntaxes without having defined how one semantic 
transforms in the other. It goes far beyond what GTFS has defined and is 
capable of defining. GTFS is your local playgarden, while NeTEx is a 
amusement park. GTFS-RT would compare to a local market where SIRI 
compares to traveling funfair.


> Furthermore, Siri is tightly coupled to the SOAP world, and thus, by 
> definition, not well suited for open data publishing. So I want to convince 
> the European Commission that publishing data files, such as in the case of 
> GTFS-RT, is a lot more feasible, cost-efficient and scalable than having all 
> public transit agencies in Europe have to invest in a SIRI service.

Please Pieter; by your doing of "publishing data files" real-time gets a 
bad name. Our local ministery of infrastructure and envirionment wanted to 
keep "open data" only tied to *static files* not realtime datastreams. 
When are you  going to preach solutions like a scaleble european 
enterprise service bus? Don't let the work of Pieter Hintjens die with 
him, this guy made it possible.

SIRI is implemented by many operators already, and similar to Germany's 
VDV it supports dynamic subscription management. Yes, the distribution 
with push then poll might be an issue, but semantically it has a much 
higher level of detail than GTFS-RT. Nothing stops anyone to filter SIRI 
to GTFS-RT, but some people want the output for more than just a journey 
planner.

Why doesn't the European Commission focus on the real problems, like 
european train and airplane schedules not being available? And ticketing 
being a closed market?

Stefan