Belgian public transport company teams up with Google
News! De Lijn, a Flemish bus company, is about to share its data with Google. This means you will be able to look up your trip on Google Maps and Google will return you the possibility of going by public transport. It is a nice step in the right direction since they’re thinking about usability.
But let’s be pragmatic: if their customers want to find their way to the timetables as easy as possible, there is no way they can afford it to support all platforms and all ways of providing data. Therefore there is an easy solution: open it up! Let everyone use your data! Dozens of people, such as the iRail-team, can’t wait to get started on developing new apps and tools.
So yes: news, but not good nor bad news. We’re status quo. Except for some politicians who might think they delivered good work. Am I going to use it? Yes, I am! Everything beats the website of the company at this moment. Am I happy with it? No. If I could I would use an application which is optimised for social interaction and works really fast on my non-googlish phone.
Transport data roaming
When I’m writing code I’m quite regularly distracted by what-ifs… For instance: what if I’m on a train towards Spain and I boarded in Belgium. As I have a smartphone with an application installed (let’s call it BeTrains for iRail) which gives me real-time information on my trajectory, I don’t want BeTrains to be useless once I cross the border. BeTrains should automatically switch to the trainsystem of that country.
This seems like a pretty good and easy-done concept. However we want to do it the right way: we don’t want other application developers to deal with the same hassle of implementing each country for which it wants to work for. We don’t even want to think about that. Every country should have the same standard for bringing its data to the public. To do this for the EU is a nice start since in Europe transport data is open by law.
We (the iRail team) are however not the right people to make this standard. Our momentum is too small for Europe. Who in Croatia is ever going to think they should be conform to the Belgian system? We need a European open standard for real-time public transport data. We can create a consortium that sets these standards as today everyone is opening its data in their own random way (standards should exist for all open data, whether it’s weather information or geolocation data).
Situation today for standardisation of public transport data
Talking about open data today is more and more accepted. For instance I came across this video about a presentation by the Massachusetts Department of Transportation:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=URmKRTU-hxQ]
This is an interesting evolution but if we look at their API response itself it looks something like this:
<Root>
<Red Line=”Red”>
<Trip>157</Trip>
<PlatformKey>RQUAS</PlatformKey>
<InformationType>Arrived</InformationType>
<Time>2010-10-07T08:02:42.302875-04:00</Time>
<TimeRemaining>-00:00:18</TimeRemaining>
<Revenue>Revenue</Revenue>
<Route>0</Route>
</Red>
…</Root>
Clearly this kind of XML would not do the trick for real-time public transport data in Europe. We have some other companies who release their data like this as well, each company in another format, and slightly different information.
To make this «transport data roaming» work, we need someone to tell us what to implement. Just for now we’re telling people that we need this and we hope someone will come up with something we can implement. As at this moment we have an API we’re using this non-standard one we specified ourselves.
Meeting the NMBS
After listening to Michaël Vanloubbeeck on their Internet strategy, he asked us straight away what we thought about their mobile web application. There are three points we thought worth mentioning:
- The number of clicks before you can see the right data is about 4 times too much. I only want to click once.
- There is no autocompletion on the station names.
- There is no button to switch destination and departure station
On top of that we noted that for big phones like most android, maemo/meego, bada and iphone phones, the site was too small. It was a great mobile website optimized for small screens and fast connections. We concluded that they, in comparison to iRail, have a totally different focus. Both approaches are needed Bouncy Castle however and we need to cooperate on this. The NMBS however responded that their mobile website is aimed to target all phones and anyone, which we can’t agree on. Discussion still open.
The second discussion is one that we started. We are still having difficulties with Stibbe. Stibbe is a respected law firm in Belgium who apparently has been hired by the NMBS to try to close us down. They’re quite aggressive in their approach by sending scary letters that our lawyer (if you read this, thanks for your free support, we appreciate it a lot!) seems to handle a lot better than we do. They didn’t have a clue about that however. They ensured us however that they will *try* to stop these actions and let us work as we were doing. So the logical question for us is: “Can we hereby officially use your data?”; Yet this seemed to be more complicated as we thought. The real discussion had been started.
The first problem was that for the legal aspect of this we were talking to the wrong people. Personally we still think we are not doing anything illegal and not one of their arguments makes that statement fall. As they are going to stop their lawyers however, we’re going to assume that there is no-one left to sue us and this has encouraged us to crank up our developing speed. The bad part about this legal story is that they didn’t guarantee us anything and we might get a reply about that matter in quite some time.
Their second problem was that the Internet and mobile devices are changing all the time. And there are so many mobile devices they don’t know where to start developing. I didn’t really get why they use this against open data, but I guess it might be that they thought open is just a fad like myspace which will disappear eventually. So this is where I protested heavily and said open data would be a very good thing to do: they would provide a standard API for the data and provide a standard format. Everyone will be able to make their app for their phone and their system. For free! Isn’t that something you should be happy with? No they said. They wanted to be able to delete all the applications that didn’t fit their standard. So I started talking about free market where people who use a bad app will eventually use another app. Discussion still open.
Some other interesting points:
- They recognized that they were wrong by using lawyers in the first place without mailing us. They could have filed a bug-report if something did not meet their standards (which was a lot back then, we agreed)
- They were already planning to provide their own API at some point in the future with a little data in it, to be used under certain conditions.
- They are not (yet) convinced open data is the future. “It’s not because we’re a public company that our data should be public.”
- Complaints about iRail that reach the nmbs will be, as good as possible, forwarded to our mailinglist.
- They think iRail as external API provider is not an option. However, they did not explicitly ask us to stop (nor did they recommend us to continue). They’ll “quality check” iRail and provide us with feedback (probably just the mobile site, not our API)
- We asked if Nokia could sponsor iRail without being sued by NMBS. That’s a question we expect an answer on in October. They didn’t understand however why Nokia wouldn’t come to NMBS for that instead.
- They have partners with whom they share data. Partners include MIVB, De Lijn, Google, …
- They promised they won’t block our IP’s (that’s not something we should be thankful for in fact. In our opinion it would be illegal for them to do so)
I would like to thank the NMBS for inviting us and I hope this will Jumping Castle be one of many meetings. We sure did have a lot of arguments but I think that’s a positive thing. We are not satisfied with the outcome of this ffrst meeting, but rumour has it that Rome wasn’t built in a day as well.
Afterwards Yeri and I had a very good and inspiring chat. Keep informed because very soon we will cover you with awesomeness! (we’re serious about this)
Pieter
Yeri
Follow me on identi.ca – Pieter