[Talk-transit] NaPTAN case study

[Peter Miller]

On 22 Oct 2009, at 12:55, Chris Hill wrote:

> Christopher Osborne wrote:
>> Hello all
>>
>> As part of the data.gov.uk <http://data.gov.uk> experiments, I had
>> several encounters with top brass of various gov departments. They
>> were very excited in the NaPTAN import, none of them had heard about
>> it and as far as I know it is the first example of crowdsourced
>> improvements to a UK gov dataset.
>>
>> Very glad to see http://mappa-mercia.org/novam/ is back online today.
>> I need to prepare some briefing information to send back to top  
>> brass,
>> and was wondering where are some good locations to show off the great
>> work OSMappers have been doing with the NaPTAN data?
>>
>> -- 
>> Christopher Osborne
>> www.itoworld.com <http://www.itoworld.com>
> We have checked about 75% of the stops in Hull. I have established a
> contact in the city council's transport team who has received the data
> we have checked with all of our comments about what we found so  
> far.  I
> hope he will use the data to feed back to NaPTAN so eventually the
> quality will improve all round.
>
> I created a simple overlay for the city http://bus.raggedred.net to  
> help
> to show the progress but also to highlight stops that we have found  
> that
> need correction to the NaPTAN data. I like the idea and the look of
> NOVAM, esp. because it is national and updates regularly, but it  
> doesn't
> yet show quite what I need to help the council team.

In Ipswich I have re-surveyed the NaPTAN data for about 1/3rd of the  
town so far and found errors in about 5% to 10% of the stops  
(including major transport interchanges such as the bus station,  
railway station and hospital) which have all been reported and most  
have now been fixed in the source data. I will complete the survey  
when NOVAM is up-and-running.

Just to note that Chris and I had a meeting with Transport Direct  
earlier in the week and we were discussing ways to open up a direct  
reporting system for faults back to the relevant data owners with some  
layers of management reporting back to the DfT to ensure that reports  
are dealt with. This should help with feedback in time, more on that  
in due course.

I also had a review meeting of the Ideas in Transit research project  
yesterday with the Technology Strategy Board and they were keen to  
know how the NaPTAN data was being used within OSM to do interesting  
things and wanted me to put a report together about what was  
happening. I mentioned that the data now appeared on the main OSM map  
renderings. Anything else I should mention?

In summary, I think that this import is now being seen by the UK  
government as possibly the first major example of crowd-sourcing for  
the improvement of official data, and that if they can show that it  
has been successful then more data may follow. :)


Regards,


Peter


>
> Cheers, Chris
>
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