[OSM-talk] wikiproject rail?

[James Wheare]

On Tue, 3 Oct 2006, Nick Burch wrote:

>> In related vein, I communicated a bit with the developer of
>> http://oxbus.sparemint.com/ .. real time Oxford Bus Route maps. I
>> believe he has also spoken with the OSM Oxford crew.
>
> I've tried to persuade him to join the mailing list :)

Joined :) Hullo all!

>> He's interested in collecting the bus routes, perhaps in coordination
>> with an OSM Weekend event in Oxford.
>
> We should already have almost all the roads that the buses go on  
> mapped,
> so it would just be a case of buying an all day ticket, sitting on  
> buses,
> then tagging roads afterwards.

Yep, a 24 hour Plus+Pass ticket costs £5 but if we organised it well,  
we could probably save some money by assigning routes intelligently  
and getting single operator day passes and group passes.

> We'd also need to think how best to store the bus routes, if we'd  
> store
> the locations of bus stops etc.

As Mikel mentioned, the DfT have several exchange formats for public  
transport data. Route scheduling and track data comes under the  
TransXChange format:

http://www.transxchange.org.uk/

I've looked through the various docs and examples and it's pretty  
comprehensive but I'm by no means a schema demon...

As for whether this data should be included in the OSM database,  
maybe it shouldn't, but maybe there should be a separate database for  
this kind of data, possibly related with foreign keys to the core  
database.

One thing's for certain, this data should be collected, and OSM seems  
like an organisation already well equipped to manage and supervise it.

Cheers,

James