Data for DevelopersMack D. Male

http://www.mastermaq.ca

What if you could get route information via SMS?

What if you could get the schedule for a bus stop via Twitter?

What if you could embed ETS schedule information on your own site?

We could come up with dozens of great ideas for new and interesting ways to access ETS information.

There are two main problems:

1. ETS has limited resources, and they simply can’t build everything.

2. Screen-scraping the ETS site is error-prone and time consuming.

Today, those problems go away!

Starting today, Edmonton Transit is making its route and schedule data available for free in the Google Transit Feed Specification (GTFS) format.

GTFS is an open format for describing public transportation schedules and associated geographic data.

ETS is the 29th transit authority in the world to make their data publicly available in the GTFS format.

Edmonton is the 2nd in Canada (after York in Ontario).

Where can you get the GTFS data for ETS?

http://www.edmonton.ca/transportation/ets-data-for-developers.aspx

http://code.google.com/p/googletransitdatafeed/wiki/PublicFeeds

DemoWhat does GTFS look like?

For some added incentive, there’s going to be a programming competition.

Submit your app/mashup that makes use of the ETS GTFS data, and you could win!

Details to come at:http://www.transitcampedmonton.ca

Three prizes (so far):1. 6 months of free transit2. 4 months of free transit3. 2 months of free transit

Stay tuned for more information!

Check out the website, download the GTFS data, and build something

cool and useful.

This is a step in the right direction for the City of Edmonton.

Open cities are the future!

Thanks!Questions?