HSL Navigator Fully open journey planning

Transcription

1 10th ITS European Congress, Helsinki, Finland June 2014 TP 0231 HSL Navigator Fully open journey planning Tuukka Hastrup 1* 1. Helsinki Region Transport HSL, Finland, PO BOX 100, Helsinki, Tel: , tuukka.hastrup@hsl.fi Abstract While third parties have developed a wide variety of applications using HSL's open Journey Planner API, only a few innovative applications use the respective raw open data. To remove barriers of entry and get more innovative applications using open data onto the market, HSL decided to create a fully open and innovative implementation of a journey planning application based solely on the existing open data and other open approaches. The result is an open-source HTML5 mobile application that includes navigation features and is currently in public testing in multiple European cities. There are initial signs of user interest, a basic level of application usability, and some interest by third-party developers. The application is developed based on many forms of openness that invite participation and collaboration. Keywords: journey planning, open data, open source. Introduction When Helsinki Region Transport HSL opened its Journey Planner API [1] to free third-party use in 2009, a wide variety of mobile applications appeared soon, providing better access and usability to HSL s customers with no need for HSL to invest in mobile development. Some of the applications were free, some paid for by their users. Some broke new ground with innovative features, others perfected usability by utilising the specific strengths of each mobile platform and device. Clearly, not having an open API was a barrier to entry and removing it unleashed untapped potential. Unfortunately, the raw open data of HSL s timetables, which is also available for third-party use without licensing restrictions, has not spurred a similar market of new applications this far. The open timetable data has this far resulted in one or two downloadable timetable

2 applications, as well as in the ground-breaking routing technology behind HSL s travel time map [2]. Within HSL and around, there is a plethora of other ideas that could be implemented with the help of this open data, but other significant barriers must be preventing them. Such barriers probably include the learning and development efforts required to bridge the seemingly wide gap between raw data and a complete application. Given this background, HSL wanted to remove further barriers to new mobility applications and, as an experiment, decided to participate in Code for Europe [3] in 2013, which funded one entrepreneurial software developer (the author of this paper) to develop a fully open journey planning and public transport navigation application with the goal of providing a framework and a skeleton for innovative applications based on open data. What follows is an evaluation of the starting point and a report on the results. Starting point The idea of HSL Navigator [4] is a mobile journey planning application for public transport passengers. It is meant for on-the-go use and provides quick planning as well as door-to-door, turn-by-turn navigation guidance including taking the available realtime data into account. The aim is to relieve the passengers from having to plan their trip in advance and from the stress caused by complex itineraries and traffic disruptions, not unlike modern car GPS navigators have done for drivers of private cars. This application could not be implemented on top of HSL's existing Journey Planner service [5], which lacked various central features such as walking directions and realtime functionalities. As the old system was monolithic and proprietary, it was natural to implement the new system starting from the raw open data at the bottom as a solid foundation as well as to make it modular and completely open so that future applications can improve on it incrementally. Fortunately, the open ecosystem of today provides many building blocks that can be freely re-used in a modern IT system. Some of them are collaborative works-in-progress, some are established leaders in the field. HSL Navigator currently benefits from the following open resources, which each remove some of the barriers to entry when integrated into a complete solution. Collaborative open data: OpenStreetMap OpenStreetMap [6] is a map that anyone can edit, comparable to Wikipedia being the

3 encyclopedia that anyone can edit. Naturally, their content is openly licensed. This removes the barrier of having to negotiate a license from some other map provider, if data of suitable quality is even available. Further, while there are areas not covered well by OpenStreetMap yet, many metropolitan areas are covered in more detail than in other map sources. Crucially, these details include footpaths which are important for providing turn-by-turn navigation to reach the initial public transport stops, any transfer stops and the final destination. OpenStreetMap may include address information down to the building entrance, which enables true door-to-door routing. Figure OpenStreetMap address data visualised Government open data Open data provided by governments and other public authorities may or may not be of better quality than other available sources, or it may be complementary: for example, areas with poor or no previous OpenStreetMap coverage can be initialised with compatibly-licensed open data from the government, as has happened for instance with the house address data of Denmark. In Finland, the five biggest cities opened their house address registries in

4 Open source: OpenTripPlanner The OpenTripPlanner project [7], started by TriMet [8] and the developers of some earlier open-source passenger information systems, collaboratively develops journey planner software whose source code is available with an open license. It can be installed on a server to provide an API that given the start and the destination locations calculates multimodal itineraries using street network from OpenStreetMap, public transport timetables in the GTFS format [9] and realtime information in the GTFS-realtime format [10]. Open innovation: localroute.js As an alternative to route calculation by OpenTripPlanner, it's also possible to use another open-source software solution called localroute.js [11]. This is a new innovative software library that already powers HSL's highly-affordable yet powerful travel time map service [2]. The technology was born after HSL opened its schedule data, which the start-up founder of BusFaster Oy used in prototyping a solution to the third-world context that he knew from his visits to Lima in Peru: many of the big cities of the world are in a dire need of a journey planner but mobile internet access is not extensive and affordable. localroute.js solves this by compressing the schedule data, downloading it on the mobile device for offline access, and calculating the itineraries in the device. The technology found its first commercial application in the travel time map, where it enables the computationally intensive itinerary calculations to be offloaded to each user's device and thus relieves HSL from maintaining a computing cluster to provide this service. Open API: CitySDK Linked Data API CitySDK [12] is a collaborative project by six European cities to develop standardised application programming interfaces (APIs) to their services in order to facilitate development of applications that can be easily deployed in new cities. The functionality provided by the CitySDK Linked Data API is simple-to-use geographic operations on open data sets. The API receives its strength from building on top of OpenStreetMap and allowing linking of other data sets such as public transport routes and schedules as layers on top of OpenStreetMap. As a result, the service can answer queries such as "Where is the closest park bench from here", "Which public transport routes run nearby" or "Which entrance to this building has the given address?" 4

5 Open platform: HTML5 HTML5 is a widely supported combination of open technologies for creating applications such that a single HTML5 application can work on practically all modern browsers and devices on both desktop computers and mobile devices. This is in contrast to the alternative of building platform-specific applications for Apple s proprietary ios, for Android currently tightly controlled by Google, for any other competing platforms, and yet having to ignore some customers whose platform of choice you cannot support. Of course, everything else being equal, a generic HTML5 application loses in fidelity to an application that is tailored to a specific platform or device. However, as there are few barriers to entry with the open approach, third parties can easily offer (and at least in the case of HSL, have offered) applications tailored to every platform imaginable. Figure HSL Navigator after loading 5

6 Results As of writing, HSL Navigator is in public testing in Finland in Helsinki region, Tampere and Oulu, as well as in Greater Manchester in the UK and Amsterdam in the Netherlands. In addition, there's a nationwide version based on the open data provided by Finnish Transport Agency. Before any marketing or significant publicity, these versions have attracted frequent users, which suggests certain amount of interest and a base level of usability. Open-source implementation When opened in a browser, the HTML5 application locates the current position of the device, and sets that location as the starting point for journey planning. The user chooses the destination by typing in an address, or by choosing their desired service type (library, restaurant, park etc.) and then selecting from the provided list of closest venues. It's also possible to choose the destination by tapping on the map. The application provides a summary of one or more suggested itineraries, and the user can explore them on the map before choosing to start navigating one of them, at which point the map zooms in to the current location and a red circle starts to track the position on the map. At any time, the user can request new itineraries by tapping their current position, for instance if they arrive to the stop quicker than planned or if they miss the suggested departure. Open participation HSL Navigator includes a proof of concept of open participation by users: if a user notices a problem in the map data, they can leave a note on the map, after which any OpenStreetMap editor can handle the issue. Any resulting corrections are picked up by the application during the next update of the map data. There is room for much more modes of user participation, such as problem reports regarding other data sources used, improvement ideas for the application, or feedback on the quality of the transport services. Open collaboration The full openness of the system enables new forms of collaboration with little need for contract negotiations. For example, City of Oulu was able to get on board and get visible 6

7 results in one day when they opened their schedule data. Currently, the city is in the process of acquiring a new passenger information system and one part of the process is deciding which parts of the system they could base on HSL Navigator. Similarly, a few businesses are already building their products on top of the system. Vedia Oy has opened for testing Vedia City Navigator [13], which is targeted at people travelling between St Petersburg in Russia and Helsinki in Finland. GoEuropa is prototyping a version as a potential successor to their iplaner [14] service in the cities of Lublin and Poznan in Poland. Conclusions To remove barriers of entry and get more innovative applications using open data onto the market, HSL decided to create a fully open and innovative implementation of a journey planning application based solely on the existing open data and other open projects. The result is a HTML5 mobile application that includes navigation features and is currently in public testing in multiple European cities. There are initial signs of user interest, a basic level of application usability, and some interest by third-party developers. The application is developed based on many forms of openness that invite participation and collaboration. Acknowledgements Code for Europe is an activity of the Commons for Europe project co-funded by the European Union's Competitiveness and Innovation Framework Programme (CIP) References

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