Luxembourg, 28 October 2010

Open Street Map (OSM) is a very successful project that started in 2004 to make geo-information readily available to everyone with clear licenses attached. The person who started OSM, Steve Coast, now launched a new project to do the same for public transport information. This new project called Transiki (transit-wiki), is in very early alpha.

In his weblog Steve Coast explains the reasons for starting the project:

"What is the basic idea? Well, transit data is in 1,000 weird proprietary formats held by 1,000 different organizations with about 1,000 different attitudes to opening it up. And that's very boring. So above that there exists a tier of companies who'll harmonize it and sell it to you along with stacks of software for doing interesting things with it. Like route across it. And as you've seen, the data is imperfect (like maps), badly licensed (like maps) and you're not able to change it (like maps)."

So in a way the issues are similar for transit information, as they were for maps in 2004. At the same time, transit information itself is different, hence a separate project.

"Transiki (will) look a lot like openstreetmap. The API looks similar. Instead of nodes, you have transit points. Instead of ways, you have transit routes. Instead of bizzaro-the-clown ontologies, there is tagging. There will be a GTFS importer. The code is open. The data is open. There will be the ability to modify both the long term and short term data. That means you can modify either the timetable for next season and you can also flag a particular route that is delayed right now today. Like openstreetmap, the API is open and free. And you can throw services against it to read/write as you see fit.

So this all begs the question, why not build this in openstreetmap? Well there are a number of reasons. OSM isn't really built for that kind of realtime changing timetable data, the transit data has to integrate across all the other data, transit routes aren't exactly trivial to add in to the data as relations."

The project can be followed in the Transiki project weblog, and of course the currently existing code is also available.

(found via openmind)

This is a video of the evolution of Open Street Map in Europe over the past years, to give a notion of speed and scope of the project: