[Talk-transit] NaPTAN case study

Peter Miller peter.miller at itoworld.com
Thu Oct 22 15:00:08 BST 2009


On 22 Oct 2009, at 14:45, Jerry Clough - OSM wrote:

> Unlike Chris I have not been actively surveying lots of bus stops:  
> there is too much other work in Nottingham for this to be a  
> worthwhile activity in the short term. Also the NAPTAN import has  
> exposed areas which were traced from Yahoo: in verifying one stop I  
> had to move a considerable number of ways (something I knew needed  
> doing, but had been putting off). My general impression (probably  
> based on around a 10% sample) is that most Nottingham data is well  
> located: I'd be surprised if real changes is needed for more than 5%  
> of stops. The major error detected so far is on the site of City  
> Hospital where a bus stop is shown in the middle of the Urology  
> building. I suspect that there are a number of other stops which  
> have been relocated in this area as well, but it requires another on- 
> the-ground survey.
>
> However, I have been using the data (as I think I've already posted)  
> for naming and adding roads. Of course some of this may generate  
> some errors, but probably no more than those from transcribing  
> dictaphone surveys (names one road out, or on opposite side of  
> street).
>
> I don't have the precise figures, but I think I've added about 50  
> roads purely based on lines of bus stops in poorly mapped towns  
> (Bolton, Oldham, Mansfield, Grimsby). Others have used the presence  
> of NaPTAN data to assure continued existence of a road since NPE.
>
> I have used NaPTAN data to name substantial numbers of roads:  
> particularly in Nottingham, Wirral, Oldham and Grimsby areas, but  
> also in smaller towns and villages.
>
> NaPTAN data is also useful for checking boundaries of authorities.  
> For instance the OSM boundary between Notts & Derbys is shown to be  
> inaccurate by NaPTAN in the area of Pleasley : http://osm.org/go/eu9D9Pfu 
>  (easy to see because no import for Derbyshire)

Every bus stop has an associated authority in NaPTAN - possibly we  
should import this as well to help spot errors in the boundaries.
>
> Using NaPTAN data in this way gives one quite an insight as to the  
> overall quality , adherence to guidelines etc. My general impression  
> is that the Merseyside & Greater Manchester data is less useful than  
> for other areas (Nottingham, Notts, Lincs, NE Lincs etc): most stops  
> have names in the form of Major Road/Minor Road, the indicator field  
> is often inaccurate or uninformative (patch of waste land in  
> Croxteth for instance) and elsewhere on Merseyside some data appears  
> to have been copied from stop to stop. To a certain extent the  
> overall usefulness of the data for other purposes in OSM depends not  
> just on the quality of the data, but also the degree to which the  
> route network penetrates into estates. Nottingham has quite a number  
> of routes which do this using smaller buses. It is really noticeable  
> that quite large areas of Merseyside are only served by buses  
> running along main roads.

There are different sorts of 'usefulness'

1) Its helps to correct errors in NaPTAN (useful to the authority -  
work for the OSM community)
2) Its help correct errors in road names (useful to OSM to speed up  
mapping- but probably best not to rely on NaPTAN always being correct  
of course)
3) Useful for the public to help them get around by showing the stops  
on the map and the footpaths (not just the roads as on Google etc)
4) Useful to the public by allowing them to click from a bus stop to a  
list of services on a computer browser - can't do that yet?
5) Useful to the public because their iPhone can tell the when the get  
of the bus using GPS and the stop location - not yet?
7) Useful to the public because the mapping and the roads always match  
and are available correctly as soon as a redevelopment is complete -  
do we have some good examples of this yet?
9) etc etc

I think the government is generally going to be interested in the  
'useful to the public' ones, however I don't think we are quite there  
with the potential services yet - before we do that I would suggest  
that we need to get the data from 95% correct to 99.5% correct.



Regards,



Peter



>
> Incidentally the data for the Wirral also includes some taxi ranks.
>
> HTH,
>
> Jerry Clough
> SK53 on OSM
>
>
>
> From: Peter Miller <peter.miller at itoworld.com>
> To: Public transport/transit/shared taxi related topics <talk-transit at openstreetmap.org 
> >
> Sent: Thursday, 22 October, 2009 13:54:13
> Subject: Re: [Talk-transit] NaPTAN case study
>
>
> 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
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > Talk-transit mailing list
> > Talk-transit at openstreetmap.org
> > http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-transit
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Talk-transit mailing list
> Talk-transit at openstreetmap.org
> http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-transit
>
> _______________________________________________
> Talk-transit mailing list
> Talk-transit at openstreetmap.org
> http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-transit

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk-transit/attachments/20091022/23322eed/attachment.html>


More information about the Talk-transit mailing list