Project iRail: providing public transport information
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Colpaert, Pieter
The iRail project wants to fight for open data in Europe. We're doing this by scraping data* from public transport companies and putting those in a developer-friendly webservice. Apart from developing this webservice, we're also developing clients ourself. We try to deliver features like check-in-on-a-train, scan-this-qr-code-for-train-info, etc in our smart-phone clients called BeTrains. *we're not doing anything illegal according to European law
 I'm very happy to speak for an international audience because this thing is quite international. If I would go to Italy, I would have to find my way through the public transportation system. If I would want to take the train, I wouldn't know where to find the right information. Probably in the stations everything will be in Italian. I don't know any Italian, sorry. I will probably look on my smartphone, which websites should I check? What is a company that takes care of this information? I don't have a clue. What do I do? I take my smartphone, I go to my normal application and I try to find the right information. There is no such thing in Europe at this moment, which gives all my information in one place. There is no such thing as an application that combines all the different companies in one app. Who are we? We are just a bunch of people with commercial interests or people who just want to do this for fun. Just like a normal open source community, who wants to take care of this problem. At this moment we take care of the NMBS, which is the Belgian Rail Company. We take care of public transport data for developers. Anyone can use our data, which is on a server, on an API. We had some problems recently. In September we were doing all this stuff. In June we got this letter, which said we had to stop immediately with what we were doing. With arguments that we didn't agree with. There was an attorney, Iwen van den Branden. I don't think maybe he is here. Thanks Iwen for sending a letter back. Thanks to him we are still up and running. Thanks to van Son van Krikkenbornen, who is a minister here in our country. Who sent a tweet to put Irel back online. We got a huge Lijsdade effect. We are still up and running. This simple interface is what we do at this moment and what we have done for two years long. This is just a screenshot of Irel.be, which you can find all the schedules for the trains in Belgium. Only the trains at this moment, but we are planning on making this bigger. This website connects through an API, which is this nice XML interface. You can see various data, which we don't show in the web interface. But of course there are other interfaces, such as our apps and widgets. You can implement something yourself or you can use this on your website to show how your office deals with transport data. I won't feed the trolls, we also have Jason, for people who don't like XML. We have four requests in our API. That's stations, that's the list of all the stops of a certain public transport company. For trains, obviously all the stations, for buses, bus stops and so on. We also have connections to Planetrip from a certain place. We have live ports, stuff that you will see when you enter a station or a bus stop. You will see all the time schedules for the next few trains that will leave or depart, leave or arrive. We have information about one specific vehicle. You don't have to implement this API yourself. Of course we have written a lot of codes ourselves already. You can reuse that. All the code we write is under a GPL version 3 license or maybe some apps are under MIT. That's the author's choice, of course. For the lazy people who didn't go to project.irl.be yet, scan it. You got it? Wait, yeah, go on. For the people who wanted to do a project with this data, we started an NPO, that's a non-profit organization. You can use IRC for the diehackers who also use IRC, such as I and you probably. There is a mailing list, there is a track, so if you have a problem, file a bug report. We also have Twitter and Identica, so follow us on Twitter and post a lot of messages in the Identica group. If you have bigger projects or ideas, please come to us afterwards. We will answer this. We will like to answer this and work together maybe. If you are a public transport company, please come to us. We would like to work together. So what is in the future? We will do a new specification, so we will still keep these four functions, but we will add functionality. Such as more request parameters, we will use point of interest, that's a POI. Such as I want to visit Colosseum at Rome, how do I get there from my home? There are more types of transport that we will do, and of course more countries. So if you have a country, please, if you want to come to us and we will work together. If you are not a public transport company yourself, we can do a scraping thing. There are various ways to solve this problem. So with the non-profit organization, we will do our first general meetup, the 4th of February. We love public transport. At Tudat and Taxi in Brussels, so if you would like to come, you are welcome. In that specification, we will also take into account the things we learned from API version 1.0, which are quite a lot of tickets, which are still open. If you are such a person who entered the bug report for that, we will solve that in 2.0. So examples. We have Btrends.com, I will not show any screenshots of the applications because some people might be offended if I show an iPhone application or if I show a Nokia only screenshot. So please, for your system, just download it for Android and iPhone, it's in the App Store. So you can install it very quickly. And for Nokia, for the MIMO platform, we have it in nightly, so go to that URL and download it please. For Windows Phone 7, yes, we support that as well. Samsung Bahra and BlackBerry Playbook, the App Btrends is under development. You can help, of course, at our getHupagound.com. We also have widgets, which are written entirely in jQuery or in JavaScript. And these run live, you can go to widgets.irl.be and give you the right information about one certain station. So thanks for listening. I hope you enjoyed this and I hope some people will come afterwards to me to ask whether their country can be supported or certain type of transport can be supported. So if there are any questions, I would like to take them. I think I have still five minutes left. The question, can you provide for MIMO, is it only for MIMO 5 or also for the older ones? For MIMO 5 only or also for MIMO 4? Could you repeat the question? Yes. The question was, can we use this for MIMO 5 or for the older versions? I'm looking to my app developer and he says no only for 5. Yes. Will we be able to download the schedule data? Will we be able to download the schedule data? Well, for some companies this is a major issue because they don't like to share their data in an open way and afterwards so that other people can reuse that and maybe they will work with an older dump. So with data that's not really up to date. So transport companies ask us to not offer data dumps. But for some companies we will eventually do that if they allow us to do so. Yes. Can you speak up please? Sorry, I didn't get that. If you cross techniques that the providers use to stop you from screen scraping? No, we haven't. So the question was do providers try to stop us? And the answer is yes, we had this this season, this letter, but from technical points we have never received any obstruction like that. So we can wrote around that with trying all the IPs and stuff if they would do that. But at this moment we don't like to be seen as an illegal project. We are really just some awesome people who try to be awesome for everyone, even the transport companies. Yes. What is the license of the data that you already have? Yes, that's a very good question. What's the license of the data that we already have? Well, at this moment we only have the data of the Belgian train company, but the Belgian bus company, the Flamish bus company, we are talking with and we are talking with the Brussels bus company. But the data of the Belgian railway company is really normal and in our point of view it's free to use. You can use that without any license since there's... I'm sure Iain who is very close to you will give a very broad answer to that. But we generally say there are no copyrights on the data because of the second database law. You can look that up if you want or ask Iain about that. Thank you very much. Thank you very much Peter.
 I'm very happy to speak for an international audience because this thing is quite international.  If I would go to Italy, I would have to find my way through the public transportation system.  If I would want to take the train, I wouldn't know where to find the right information.  Probably in the stations everything will be in Italian.  I don't know any Italian, sorry.  I will probably look on my smartphone, which websites should I check?  What is a company that takes care of this information?  I don't have a clue.  What do I do? I take my smartphone, I go to my normal application and I try to find the right information.  There is no such thing in Europe at this moment, which gives all my information in one place.  There is no such thing as an application that combines all the different companies in one app.  Who are we?  We are just a bunch of people with commercial interests or people who just want to do this for fun.  Just like a normal open source community, who wants to take care of this problem.  At this moment we take care of the NMBS, which is the Belgian Rail Company.  We take care of public transport data for developers.  Anyone can use our data, which is on a server, on an API.  We had some problems recently.  In September we were doing all this stuff.  In June we got this letter, which said we had to stop immediately with what we were doing.  With arguments that we didn't agree with.  There was an attorney, Iwen van den Branden.  I don't think maybe he is here.  Thanks Iwen for sending a letter back.  Thanks to him we are still up and running.  Thanks to van Son van Krikkenbornen, who is a minister here in our country.  Who sent a tweet to put Irel back online.  We got a huge Lijsdade effect.  We are still up and running.  This simple interface is what we do at this moment and what we have done for two years long.  This is just a screenshot of Irel.be, which you can find all the schedules for the trains in Belgium.  Only the trains at this moment, but we are planning on making this bigger.  This website connects through an API, which is this nice XML interface.  You can see various data, which we don't show in the web interface.  But of course there are other interfaces, such as our apps and widgets.  You can implement something yourself or you can use this on your website to show how your office deals with transport data.  I won't feed the trolls, we also have Jason, for people who don't like XML.  We have four requests in our API.  That's stations, that's the list of all the stops of a certain public transport company.  For trains, obviously all the stations, for buses, bus stops and so on.  We also have connections to Planetrip from a certain place.  We have live ports, stuff that you will see when you enter a station or a bus stop.  You will see all the time schedules for the next few trains that will leave or depart, leave or arrive.  We have information about one specific vehicle.  You don't have to implement this API yourself.  Of course we have written a lot of codes ourselves already.  You can reuse that.  All the code we write is under a GPL version 3 license or maybe some apps are under MIT.  That's the author's choice, of course.  For the lazy people who didn't go to project.irl.be yet, scan it.  You got it?  Wait, yeah, go on.  For the people who wanted to do a project with this data, we started an NPO, that's a non-profit organization.  You can use IRC for the diehackers who also use IRC, such as I and you probably.  There is a mailing list, there is a track, so if you have a problem, file a bug report.  We also have Twitter and Identica, so follow us on Twitter and post a lot of messages in the Identica group.  If you have bigger projects or ideas, please come to us afterwards.  We will answer this.  We will like to answer this and work together maybe.  If you are a public transport company, please come to us.  We would like to work together.  So what is in the future?  We will do a new specification, so we will still keep these four functions, but we will add functionality.  Such as more request parameters, we will use point of interest, that's a POI.  Such as I want to visit Colosseum at Rome, how do I get there from my home?  There are more types of transport that we will do, and of course more countries.  So if you have a country, please, if you want to come to us and we will work together.  If you are not a public transport company yourself, we can do a scraping thing.  There are various ways to solve this problem.  So with the non-profit organization, we will do our first general meetup, the 4th of February.  We love public transport.  At Tudat and Taxi in Brussels, so if you would like to come, you are welcome.  In that specification, we will also take into account the things we learned from API version 1.0, which are quite a lot of tickets, which are still open.  If you are such a person who entered the bug report for that, we will solve that in 2.0.  So examples.  We have Btrends.com, I will not show any screenshots of the applications because some people might be offended if I show an iPhone application or if I show a Nokia only screenshot.  So please, for your system, just download it for Android and iPhone, it's in the App Store.  So you can install it very quickly.  And for Nokia, for the MIMO platform, we have it in nightly, so go to that URL and download it please.  For Windows Phone 7, yes, we support that as well.  Samsung Bahra and BlackBerry Playbook, the App Btrends is under development.  You can help, of course, at our getHupagound.com.  We also have widgets, which are written entirely in jQuery or in JavaScript.  And these run live, you can go to widgets.irl.be and give you the right information about one certain station.  So thanks for listening.  I hope you enjoyed this and I hope some people will come afterwards to me to ask whether their country can be supported or certain type of transport can be supported.  So if there are any questions, I would like to take them.  I think I have still five minutes left.  The question, can you provide for MIMO, is it only for MIMO 5 or also for the older ones?  For MIMO 5 only or also for MIMO 4?  Could you repeat the question?  Yes.  The question was, can we use this for MIMO 5 or for the older versions?  I'm looking to my app developer and he says no only for 5.  Yes.  Will we be able to download the schedule data?  Will we be able to download the schedule data?  Well, for some companies this is a major issue because they don't like to share their data in an open way and afterwards so that other people can reuse that and maybe they will work with an older dump.  So with data that's not really up to date.  So transport companies ask us to not offer data dumps.  But for some companies we will eventually do that if they allow us to do so.  Yes.  Can you speak up please?  Sorry, I didn't get that.  If you cross techniques that the providers use to stop you from screen scraping?  No, we haven't.  So the question was do providers try to stop us?  And the answer is yes, we had this this season, this letter, but from technical points we have never received any obstruction like that.  So we can wrote around that with trying all the IPs and stuff if they would do that.  But at this moment we don't like to be seen as an illegal project. We are really just some awesome people who try to be awesome for everyone, even the transport companies.  Yes.  What is the license of the data that you already have?  Yes, that's a very good question.  What's the license of the data that we already have?  Well, at this moment we only have the data of the Belgian train company, but the Belgian bus company, the Flamish bus company, we are talking with and we are talking with the Brussels bus company.  But the data of the Belgian railway company is really normal and in our point of view it's free to use. You can use that without any license since there's...  I'm sure Iain who is very close to you will give a very broad answer to that. But we generally say there are no copyrights on the data because of the second database law.  You can look that up if you want or ask Iain about that.  Thank you very much. Thank you very much Peter.
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