Transport for London boards the mash-up bandwagon
As introduced by Christopher Osborne @osbornec on Twitter this morning (where else do you get news these days ?), Transport for London (TfL) the government organisation responsible for most transport in London have begun providing access to limited amounts of their transit data, via a simple web feed interface.
TfL must be congratulated for this step, and by doing so using simple XML feeds including using KML for station locations. Contrast this with the route often taken to build complex (and expensive) web portals and online ordering systems for data.
Of course the missing piece which would be of great value to many developers, Google included, would be the schedule information for the Buses, Tubes and Trams that TfL runs. This information is widely available in the US and in some other European cities and is behind the transit feature of Google Maps.
Still a great step forward, and an example for others to follow !
Written and submitted from the Google Office, Dublin.
Would be great to see this data as RDF and made part of the linked data web so we can get on with some “mesh-ups”.
