The quest for open data in Ottawa has been put back on track after the city’s transit commission announced it will release OC Transpo’s GPS data to the public on March 22.
The release of OC Transpo’s GPS data will eventually lead to the development of iPhone and Blackberry applications which will allow bus riders to find out when their next bus will show up.
Derek Gour, an app designer with Slippy Soft Software, is eagerly awaiting the release of the GPS data.
His app, TransitWay, which he designed last year, provides users with all of the bus schedules on OC Transpo’s website, but with a more user-friendly interface.
“I am very interested in what this GPS data API (Application Programming Interface) will look like,” says Gour. “I’ll be looking at it and deciding whether to bring back the TransitWay app with real-time data.”
Alex Lougheed, a Centretown resident and advocate for the group Open Data Ottawa, has been helping lead the effort to win the release of OC Transpo’s GPS data to the public. The decision to comply means Ottawa will take another giant step forward to becoming an open data city, he says.
In early 2011, OC Transpo was left to deal with the fallout of an app design contest, a few months after their first release of the GPS data. Along with many other open data apps, the contest called Apps4Ottawa yielded a plethora of OC Transpo Apps.
Bus riders soon discovered these apps, but to their dismay much of the information provided to them was done so with a 30-minute delay.
This meant the bus times provided to riders were usually inaccurate, leaving OC Transpo officials to field a lot of questions and complaints which should have been directed to the apps’ developers.
Once OC Transpo re-privatized the GPS data, Lougheed says city councillors and members of Open Data Ottawa began trying to convince OC Transpo to reverse its decision.
Lougheed says he and his colleagues, as well as a number of city councillors, had to convince OC Transpo that publicly available GPS data is in the best interest of everyone.