Recognising the importance of opening up transport data, Ideas in Transit has been supporting the addition of information related to proposed UK transport schemes to Wikipedia and also into Freebase allowing both the public and policymakers to access core information about transport schemes much more quickly.

The initial work has been for the East of England where we have identified 93 schemes relating to airports, buses, roads, rail, shipping, cycling and walking with a total cost of in excess of £20billion.

For each scheme we have tried to provide a summary in a standard format identifing what is being proposed, why it is being proposed, what work is required, who is promoting it, what it would cost and when it might be built; we have also included details of any opposition to the scheme and the basis of this opposition. Information about schemes is also being presented as maps and in computer readable form (allowing it to be exported from Wikipedia and be searched using SPARQL).

We estimate that the inclusion of transport information within Wikipedia has reduced the time need to identify and understand a typical transport scheme from about 2 hours to 3 minutes. When we are able to search for schemes using SPARQL it will become even easier to find schemes of relevance to ones enquiry.

Here is a map giving details of 5 different transport schemes as detailed in the article about tranport in the Luton area.

And here is a map showing allow the recent and proposed developments, as detailed in the M25 motorway article.

As well as providing textual information and maps for schemes (which we are now publishing in svg format to allow others to edit them), we have also started publishing information as KML using Umapper such as this cycling/walking/public transport scheme in Ipswich and the East West Rail Link. Use of OpenStreetMap base mapping on Umapper allows us to publish this information using an open data license. Using KML allows the route of schemes to be exported into other applications for a variety of purposes.

For each scheme we have also created an Infobox; there was not already a suitable Infobox available within Wikipedia, so after discussion with other members of the Wikipedia community we created a new  future infrastructure project Infobox which we have now deployed in a number of articles. The main advantage of using Infoboxes is that the information can automatically be ’scrapped’ from Wikipedia into projects such as DBPedia and Freebase. Information about a number of schemes have already been imported into these databases, for example on the Norwich Northern Distributor Road.

The integration of this content into Freebase is still ‘work in progress’ with issues that need to be resolved both about having multiple infoboxes on a single page and with importing KML into the databases. When these issues are resolved it will be possible to do SPARQL queries to find schemes that meet certain criteria, which will also be able to include spatial information. For example one would be be able to search for all schemes passing within x miles of a point, or all schemes within a defined area that relate to cycling. The availability of this information in a form where it can be searched using SPARQL will allow this information to used through the UK Governments open data site as promoted by Gordon Brown and Sir Tim Berners Lee.

Our experience to date has been that the time taken to understand a transport scheme varies from 15 minutes to many hours with an average of about 2 hours to research a scheme prior to writing about it. The time taken to research schemes is so long because the information is often buried in multiple different large pdf documents, there is often out-of-date information available, undated information and incorrect information. Maps are only sometimes provided but even where they are provided they can be of very poor quality, or be unusable due to excessive compression.

We also found that it was often hard to discover what schemes exist because the information about schemes is published on many different websites. Rail schemes are detailed within large PDF documents available from the Network Rail website, Highway Agency schemes are covered on their site organised by regions which are different from the Network Rail regions and regional assembly regions); other road schemes are normally on Transport Authority websites in a variety of formats, cycling schemes are likely to be on the Sustrans website and further schemes may be included in Local Development Frameworks produced by Borough and District councils , with information about ports, airport and ‘eco-towns’ to consider as well. In all we have identified over 25 web sites which may contain scheme information in the East of England. A further difficulty is that schemes have multiple names which can change over time. For example the Norwich Northern Distributor Road is also known a the Norwich Northern Distributor Route and the NDR.

We have received support from the Wikipedia community with others contributing to the articles, adding information, correcting mistakes and providing updates on occasions. It is however our belief that it will be advantageous to continue to populate information for the rest of the country as part of Ideas in Transit and not rely completely on voluntary effort.

To see this for yourself spend 20 minutes trying to find out about the ‘Lower Thames Crossing’ without using the Wikipedia article or any derivatives of Wikipedia (which include freebase and absoluteAstronomy and others). Try to find out what the current situation is, what it would cost and where it would be built. Then read the Wikipedia article we contributed to see if you are correct. You could also try selecting 3 schemes at random from the East of England scheme list and try the same test. Do add comments to the bottom of this post with your experiences.

This work has been carried out by ITO World Ltd with support from Ideas in Transit and their sponsors who consist of the Technology Strategy Board, the Department for Transport, and the EPSRC.

Ideas in Transit has been supporting the import of the UK’s official database of 360,000 bus stops and other public transport access points (NaPTAN) into OpenStreetMap over the past year. Data for Birmingham was imported in March 2009, followed by Greater London, Suffolk and Kingston-upon-Hull in August 2009 and subsequently a further 51 authorities. To support the ground survey a new web-service, NOVAM, was developed to highlight the status of each stop on a map. This image shows the NOVAM viewer – checked stops are green and ones with comments are in orange. Blue ones exist on the ground but are missing from the NaPTAN datbase.

Subsequently to the availability of this database being announced in late December 2008, a development team was identified and practical discussions  took place during February and March 2008. An agreed translation of tagging was added to the OpenStreetMap wiki during that period together with a mechanism for mappers to request an import for their area.

It was agreed that every bus stop entered into OpenStreetMap from the NapTAN dataset should ideally be verified by ground survey and that imported stops would initially be imported with a tag ‘verified=no’; it was also agreed that it would be beneficial so supplement this information with additional attributes for the stop, including the existence of shelters, lay-bys, timetable cases and real-time information displays.

During this checking of stops data errors were found in some 5% of the data, although the nature, importance and percentages varies by authority; some were due to recent changes to station layouts,  others were simple mistakes. Many of these issues have subsequently been reported to the relevant transport authority to improve the official data.

As a result of this initiative the NaPTAN data is now available within the general OpenStreetMap database for many parts of the country. Here is a view of central London from CloudMade – notice the bus stop names and also the house numbers and local amenities.

And here is the bus station in Coventry – note that all the footpath and service road details are included. The positions of the bus stops from NaPTAN have been adjusted to more accurately match the station layout.

The inclusion of bus stops into the mapping and the availability of this bus mapping site based on OpenStreetMap data has encouraged many users to also add bus routes for UK towns and cities, including Birmingham, Coventry, Hull, Ipswich and London. This image from the map of the Ipswich area show the one way routing of buses around the town centre.

An experimental addition to this bus mapping site will soon allow users to link from the bus stops to the official bus departure information for the requested stop – this would not have been possible without the inclusion of the ‘atco-code’ from the NaPTAN import into the OpenStreetMap bus stop data.

A major benefit of including public transport information within OpenStreetMap is due to the richness of context relevant to pedestrians. This comparison site allows one to morph between OpenStreetMap and commerical online mapping. Click on this link to compare the information available from each source in the vicinity of the Route 66 guided busway in Ipswich (which was built over 10 years ago). Notice that the guided busway and footpaths are missing from the commercial mapping.

One of the unique features of OpenStreetMap is that it can be updated almost instantly to show the current situation. Notice that this map for part of Cumbria shows both the bus stops and the recently damaged and currently unusable Calva Bridge which is shown as being ‘under construction’ and therefore not available to traffic.

The inclusion of UK bus stop information has already provided a useful additional source of information for the traveling public. It has also encouraged a lot of innovation and interest in public transport within the project. Further innovations can now be expected. The import of additional information from the NaPTAN database will continue and the issue of syncronising the data sources will need to be addressed; in November 2009 the NaPTAN data for Birmingham was updated by merging in additional information from the current official dataset into OpenStreetMap.

This initiative started when ITO World Ltd, an industrial partner in Ideas in Transit became aware that both Transport Direct and National Traveline were supportive of the idea and also that the NAPTAN database didn’t contain any 3rd party data that would preclude such a release. Ideas in Transit will continue to support the project over the coming years with support from the Technology Strategy Board, the Department for Transport and the EPSRC.

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].