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 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!