Data and Public Transportation
It's a little outside our usual realm, but this article from the Atlantic (hat tip to Greater Greater Washington for pointing this out), really touches on a lot of the same things I've been talking about in my series on Building a Voter File:
Just a few days after Apple’s iPhone launched, a trip planner for the San Francisco Bay Area’s subway system, BART, appeared in the iTunes application store, which sells iPhone and iPod software for download. User reviews were mixed. But I was still floored. How could a local government agency move so quickly?
Turns out, it didn’t. In 2007, Google engineers asked public-transit agencies across the country to submit their arrival and departure data in a simple, standard, open format—a text file, basically, with a bunch of numbers separated by commas—so Google Maps could generate bus and subway directions. A handful of agencies, including BART, decided to go a step further and publish that raw data online. Once they did that, any programmer could grab the data and write a trip planner, for any platform.
The whole article goes on to discuss some potential impacts of open APIs on government agencies and how the public could use their data. It gives you hope, no? Read the whole thing.
cool post...
cool post... interesting..
keyword tool