Opening up transit data
In this TEDxGhent talk, Pieter Colpaert explains his PhD in 3 minutes. It’s at the same time 3 simple reasons why it’s better to open up transit information, rather than each party keeping it to themselves:
- We don’t want a separate app for each and every transit agency.
- We don’t want the transit agencies themselves to decide what questions we will ask to our smartphone when the data would be shared among transit agencies.
- We don’t want only 1 private company to build the only application: there are way too many users for this 1 company to come up with an app that works for everyone.
Opening up the data for (new) companies to inflatable water slide enrich their services or products and opening up the data for the Web so that smart clients can do their own reasoning over the data, is what we see as the next big innovation in transport information.
Introduction classes to the iRail API
Want to learn how to use the iRail API? Want to be able to create your own interface for the Belgian railway company?
We are organising free master/introduction classes the 5th of September from 4pm until 6pm with room for enough Questions and Answers. Only 10 spots available. Register here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/irail-hack-day-2014-tickets-12526947437
Submit your app written on top of the iRail API
The iRail APIs have been around for almost 4 years now. Did you build something from our APIs? We would love to know! Fill it out on our public google drive spreadsheet. You can find the current results over here:
We are looking for new ways to finance the maintenance and further development of a national API for mobility in Belgium. Therefore, we first need some numbers to show that our API does make an impact. Next, we will inform you about further development as we will start streamlining the interfaces into one URI space.
Looking forward to your responses!
Pieter
iRail hack day invitation
We have a pile of awesome development and markcom work still up for the grabs. In order to celebrate that this work is still up for anyone to do, we’re going to organise the first iRail hack day of 2014!
Register here!
What’s the schedule and who do we need?
The 5th of September at 10am we’re assembling in Ghent (exact location to be announced). We will divide in 3 teams:
1. The hyperRail developers team:
This is a small team who is castelo inflavel fixing issues of the hyperRail repository, the engine behind iRail.be.
This team already consists of: Nico Verbruggen, Sam Hendrickx, Brecht Van de Vyvere and myself. There’s still room for more though!
2. The strategic team:
iRail is more than just an app. We’re a community of people that wants to make getting around in Belgium easier by wrangling data. How do we proceed though? What communication channels should we deprecate? Which should we keep? Are you writing our next blog posts, tweets or facebook messages?
3. The app developers and API reusers:
Are you already creating an app on top of the iRail API? Great! Come along and talk with the developers about new features (did you know you will be able gather check-ins in trains from your users with the iRail API?).
Are you someone who is planning to create an app? We’re willing to give you crash courses for your specific platform. Come along!
What do we still need?
– A location for ~10 to 20 people. Can you provide us that? Great! You’re our main sponsor!
– Food and drinks!
– You! (if you fit in one of the 3 groups)
Register here!
So, this first hack day focuses on iRail.be and its API with a limited amount of people in order to keep productivity. The next hack day will be about adding more datasets such as De Lijn, MIVB/STIB and TEC.
Launch of the new iRail
Hi all!
Last week we launched the new iRail. It was among other projects, like the rework of the open Summer of Code website, one of the things I was able to work on these last eight weeks as an intern at iRail/Open Belgium.
In this post, I’d like to talk about the new iRail and what makes it so cool. Aside from the visual refresh, we’ve made a few functional additions below the hood of the application that allow us to do really awesome things in the future.
Visual overhaul
But let’s start at the beginning, shall we? The new iRail has been given a visual overhaul — it should be easier to use on the desktop, and on mobile as well. You’ll have to do a little more scrolling on mobile, but now we can avoid those nasty, long list boxes; you can now easily select the date and pick a date without having to use a dropdown. Especially when viewing found routes, your experience should be better than the previous version.
What the new iRail looks like
Performance
Performance wise, the app should perform at about the same speed; we’re doing some cool stuff behind the scenes to archive and transform the data as well, so if the app is any slower than usual, it’s because of this.
Under the hood
So, what have we changed under the hood? We’ve integrated the API on irail.be. If you make a regular request to, say, ‘http://irail.be/route‘, you’ll get the page you’re familiar with in your web browser. However, if you plan a route and make a request with accept headers set to return ‘application/ld+json’, you’ll receive JSON data instead of raw HTML.
Linked data
The fact that we’re providing JSON-LD means we’re using linked data. All departures you can find on the liveboards are actually linked to unique URLs that can be copied and referenced. What’s cool is that all departures are logged on archive.irail.be, so if the departure you linked is no longer on the liveboard, the data is still available via archive.irail.be, and we’ll show it to you, but with a twist!
archive.irail.be runs a linked data fragments server
Since we archive data at regular intervals, you might notice we can list the historical delays. That’s useful now, but the potential of this system is revealed in time: the more data we have, the more stats we can derive from the data; which trains had the most delays? What is the average delay? These questions can be answered (in time)!
Anyway, we hope that you enjoy the new iRail. And of course, any feedback you might have is welcome. All our source code is available freely on GitHub, so feel free to open an issue if you have feedback. If you’d like to contribute, we love pull requests as well.
I really hope you enjoy the new iRail as much as I enjoyed my internship (which is to say, a lot)!
And of course, don’t forget to spread the word (@irail)!
Nico