Ideas in Transit today recieved its first Twitter mention after OpenFlights picked up on its newly created article in the innovation portal. This was then picked up by respected mapping, GIS and cartography blogger Mapperz who Tweeted: “congrats on OpenFlights now on IdeasInTransit – excellent news”.
Its great to see users regarding being a part of the Ideas in Transit wiki as an achievement worth noting!
Ideas in Transit will be presenting at the Open Government event on Thursday this week in London which is described as “A practical one-day conference to discuss the challenges and opportunities of social technologies to enable engagement, collaboration, and transparency in government” for policy-makers, special advisors, ministers and local authority executives amongst others.
We will be promoting the Ideas in Transit research project and also some of the best and most promising innovations that we are tracking and will also be available for in-depth discussions from our stand at the event. More details after the event.
Applications are open for Mini Seedcamp London 2009 which aims to bring together 20 of the best seed stage web tech startups with experienced entrepreneurs, investors, and developers from the UK and from Europe.
Innovators need to apply before midnight 6th April 2009.
Successful candidates will then get access to a world-class network of advisors on the 20th April to help them with every aspect of their business and will be recognised as one of the 20 best startups of 2009in the UK and Europe, and will have a direct route to seed and venture capital.
Its was a busy week for transport innovation this week based on OpenStreetMap data.
OpenStreetBrowser
On the 22nd March, OpenStreetBrowser was first announced. It is a free online product that allows one to drill into OpenStreetMap data and overlay a base raster map with vector details of facilities in many different categories. Developed by a Austrian university student the service clearly shows how one can drill into map data to reveal the information behind it.
UK Route planner
Also on the 22nd March a new UK route planner was released using OpenStreetMap data which offered routing for all sorts of users, including horse riders and HGV vehicles as well as for pedestrians, cyclist and car drivers. It was developed by Andrew Bishop in the UK and has some clever ideas about how to bias different road classifications.
Cycle Streets
Then on the following day a new on-line route planner for cyclists in the UK was released as a beta. Cycle Streets provides a comprehensive journey routing service with photomap for any area in the UK where OpenStreetMap data is available. It has been in developed by the people behind the Cambridge Cycle Journey planner who are now looking for councils and cycling groups around the country to take start using it. Funding is by donations and from authorities that will pay to have the service available in their areas.
There are specialist OpenStreetMap email lists for Great Britain, Routing and also for Public Transport related issues
OpenStreetMap today announced that the number of registered users had reached 100,000. It has taken a little over 18 months since the 10,000th registered user and under 5 years since the first. The map has been growing fast with high quality levels in areas where multiple mappers have been working and for a growing number of places the OpenStreetMap provides better mapping data than from commercial providers. Flickr now uses OpenStreetMap mapping for Bejing, Kabul, Baghdad and Tokyo.
Analysing the data with OSM Mapper (developed by ITO World with funding from Ideas in Transit) one finds that there is a very steep curve of contribution with over half the 1 million linear and area features having been last edited by the top 41 contributors and half the remaining 3259 contributors making less than 10 edits. The image below shows the pattern of contribution by the top 14 UK contributors.
In addition to individual imports their are also many significant bulk imports including a project to import the UK NaPTAN dataset giving details of over 360,000 UK bus stops and other public transport access points with permission from the Department for Transport and from Traveline.
OpenStreeMap has enabled many other significant initiatives, including cycle maps, routing for pedestrians, cyclists as well as for drivers and traffic modeling. Some of these projects are detailed in the OpenStreetMap category of the Ideas in Transit wiki.
On the 7th March Rewired State organised a ‘Hack day’ at the Guardian offices at which 80 developers created working projects from public sector information between 10am to 6pm, and presented them to government officials and the media in the evening. Job Centre Pro Plus was a clean rewrite of the Job Centre Plus government website and Companies Open House made registered (and public) details of UK companies more accessible and usable.
DirectGov Innovations were impressed and offered support to 4 of the projects and 4ip sprung into action and are now in talks with 3 of the projects about funding further development.
Direct Gov Innovations subsequently previously released accident data involving cyclists for the UK in the years 2005-2007 on the 10th March as a spreadsheet for re-use and within 24 hours a blogger had published a KML version of the data so that it could be viewed directly in Google Earth. For ideas about how this data might be used check out the CrashStat project on our wiki which elegantly presents accident data for New York for the period 1995-2005.
If you know of any other initiatives that we should know about then please tell us on the blog or add it to our wiki.
Ideas in Transit invited a contingent of leading and emerging innovators in the transport field to TerraFuture, a 2 day high profile conference organised by the Ordnance Survey which focused on how to use the power of geography to help resolve some of the important challenges facing society including sustainability, climate change and transportation by using the power of collaboration.
The research project brought together 9 young companies, all using using the web to develop low-carbon solutions to transport problems including ecoescape, loco2, city car club, liftshare, Cambridge Cycle Campaign, Carbon Diem, Fellow Travellers and YourParkingSpace and ran a workshop for these innovators prior to the main event where the innovators and researchers were able to share their experiences.
At the main conference there were a many impressive speakers, however for our project the highlight was probably Charles Leadbeater who gave a sense of the revolutionary nature of the changes that the web was going to bring to many areas of our lives, including to transportation. He warned the established businesses present that the sheer weight of innovations which were coming, which he referred to as the ‘pebbles on the beach’, risked swamping established businesses, which he refereed to as ‘boulders’, unless they adapted fast! He highlighted the opportunities available for those large companys that did engage with this source of creativity.
We had of course assembled a group of innovators who were developing the very businesses that he had been talking about. There were a number of opportunities for our group to both learn from and contribute to the main conference. We posed many of the more challenging questions to come from the floor and contibuted to ideas in various break-out sessions. There was also some hard questioning of the policy makers in the transport arena that afternoon, for example, when Ali Clabburn from Lift Share qizzed Paul Markwick (Chief Executive of the Vehicle Licensing Agency) on the government’s emphasis on a ‘technical fix’ to carbon emissions from transport, a theme picked up by others.
We were very encouraged by the event and are looking for futher opprtunities to build further connections between the established players and the emergent businesses.
On New York Turf has a subway map with details of subway routes and subway entrances. When zoomed out the network is visible and when zoomed in one can see the details of the actual stations and the exact locations where one can enter and leave each station.
Much of the original information used on this site was already available on printed posters within the station and this information was photographed and digitized by volunteers to make it conveniently available for pre-trip planning purposes [1].
There are still some outlying stations for which details are needs and contributors are invited to submit photographs of the maps at these stations[2] and contributors are also invited to add translations of the English text to make the site available in more languages[3]. Additional information is being collected by volunteers for each station on dedicated wiki pages[4].
Does this matter? Yes I think it does. Public transport journey planners need considerable amounts of detail of this nature in order to give good results, and it is likely to be prohibitively expensive to collect and maintain this commercially. There is a new CEN standard IFOPT which is able to contain details of entrances, escalators and lifts for stations however the new challenge this creates is how to populate it. The New York Subway Map project is a good indicator that volunteers can will actively engage with such a project or indeed set it up themselves if it doesn’t exist.
From a copyright perspective the data available from this project would appear to be a derived work based on information provided by the authorities on the posters at the station entrances and also from Google, their mapping provider and various volunteer contributors. Consideration of copyright issues would need to be considered before collecting data that could be exported and used without restrictions and this may require a more detailed original survey.
Following the lead of community supported projects such as OpenStreetMap commercial companies are now also tapping into their communities as sources of data. TeleAtlas is making good use of user contributed data from Tom Tom users [5] as are Google with their Map Maker product[6].
This is possibly one of the most challenging projects I have been involved with. There is so much creativity now out there and yet how do we work to identify and encourage and and to bring it into the mainstream of ‘intelligent transport systems’ (ITS)? I’m hoping this Blog will generate some debate around this. One of the questions in my mind is as follows: can we bring user innovators and the ITS industry together – or are they like oil and water?
Two new trip planners for pedestrians, cyclists an motorists have be launched in the UK in the past few months, both based on OpenStreetMap data, and both offered without charge. The software for both projects is likely to be made open source.
OpenRouteService was developed at the University of Bonn and uses the new OpenLS services published by the Open Geospatial Consortium. It was launched in Germany in May 2008 and coverage was extended to cover the UK and Ireland early in September 2008.
The Your Navigation service was was also launched in the UK in September 2008. Using both services it is possible to select a start and end location and a mode and the service will calculate a suitable route.
Here is YourNavigation for a walking route in central London.
Walking route in central London
And here is the same route by bicycle:
Bicycling route in Central London
And by car:
Driving route in Central London
OpenRouteService is able to offer similar functionality but can also use real time (TMC) traffic data for the Northrhine-Westphalia and Bavaria areas. The image below shows two areas of traffic congestion in the Cologne area..
Traffic in Cologne
The static data on which this is based is collected by volunteers for OpenStreetMap and is available on a Creative Commons Licence. The OpenStreetMap community is currently improving the tagging of road and path data to improve the accuracy of the routing. Coverage for OpenStreetMap is expanding fast in the UK and elsewhere.
