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Deutsche Bahn starts opening their data—with vertical movers, for now

- November 3, 2015 in News

It has been a mighty long wait, but Open Knowledge Germany recently announced that Deutsche Bahn will soon hop onto the Open Data train, if you excuse that lame joke. Apart from a station dataset (Ril 100)—which could serve as an “official” and truly openly licensed data source for the large number of unofficial station lists—the biggest chunk for the soon to be released DB Open Data Portal is going to be data sets on all the elevators of all the stations operated by DB Station & Service.

DB's elevator data (red triangles) superimposed on OSM tiles. While the southernmost elevator is mapped spot-on, the subterranean one right to the north of it is not yet mapped in OSM. Map tiles © OpenStreetMap Contributors

DB’s elevator data (red triangles) superimposed on OSM tiles. While the southernmost elevator is mapped spot-on, the subterranean one right to the north of it under the intersection is not yet mapped in OSM.
Map tiles © OpenStreetMap Contributors

As explained in Open Knowledge Germany’s follow-up blogpost (complete with sample data), DB is very interested in how they can provide their data in formats palatable for the community that is going to use them, and how the OSM community might think about extending the elevator tagging schema to include, among others, unique identifiers for elevators. Said identifiers could come in handy for the rudimentary alpha-version of an elevator status API that was announced to launch right in time for DB’s 3d Hackathon—think indoor routing accounting for disabled elevators, for instance.

If you have strong opinions on rail data, elevators, tagging schemes or APIs, now would be the perfect time to chime in!

Open Knowledge Foundation Austria MeetUp on Open Transport Data took place on 14.11.2013 in Vienna

- December 2, 2013 in Events, featured, opinion

About 2 weeks ago, on the 14th of November 2013 an Open Knowledge Foundation Austria (OKF-AT) MeetUp took place in the late afternoon with the title & topic: Open Transport (Data). The MeetUp was hosted at Fabasoft (one of the bigger Austrian IT vendors) in Vienna, Austria. The idea of this event was to present and discuss the current status of transport information systems in Austria and Open Data / Open Transport as well as to discuss how these sector can become more open and take a look into planned future steps of open transport in Austria.
OKF-AT-MeetUp-OpenTransport-small
FOTO: Copyrights: Fabasoft AG; Fotograf: Peter Ehringer
After a short introduction by Helmuth Bronnenmayer (Board Member of OKF-AT) telling the ~ 35 people of the audience about objectives and activities of the Austrian chapter of the Open Knowledge Foundation (see slides: http://de.slideshare.net/okfo/okf-atmeet-upopentransport20131114) the topic of the MeetUp was introduced by Peter Parycek (Danube University Krems) and Robert Harm (open3) by giving an insight in the area of Open Transport in the MeetUp keynote – see: http://de.slideshare.net/okfo/okf-atmeet-upopentransportkeynote. Peter introduced the idea of open transport (data) and showcased the importance to open up transport data to (beside others) enable cross-border mobility services and apps. He also introduced the ODP AT – the Open Data Portal Austria project that develops an open data portal for all data – beside government data – in Austria (science, education, industry, NGO & NPO, citizens, OpenGLAM, et al) that will be launched in May / June 2014.