Jon WorthToday and tomorrow I’m at #OpenTransport2025 in Wien. Friends and fellow regular rail travellers @moof @bovine3dom @maartje are also here. I’ll post as and when I can!
#OpenTransport2025 Yes ideas can happen in unlikely places. But to the person just scrolling on their phone while pissing at the urinal: that’s grim. Did you wash your phone too? 🤔
Talking to the @transitous people at #OpenTransport2025
One headache: data on international trains that is missing the other side of the border
My EN Dacia Hegyeshalom 🇭🇺 - Sighisoara 🇷🇴 is 1 train but shows as 2 on Transitous
Stefan Lindbohm@jon @transitous This can also be due to the EN actually technically being a coach group (kurswagen), or train that turns into a coach group. Often the carriers on either side don’t even have data on what happens outside their own country.
This is solved in MERITS with a lot of manual links in the form of ”at border station X, train number Y is to be linked with train number Z”
Even with perfect open data in each country (lol), any aggregation of international data needs this integration layer
@stefanlindbohm Yes, but having spoken to the @transitous people here, there are cases where *even with the same train number* the data is snipped at the border. Hungary and Romania are apparently notable for this.
@jon @transitous Yeah, because each country have only its own data. That’s where the integration needs to happen. The manual case is maybe not the main one, but the point of integration processes still stands.
Cycling on Rails@stefanlindbohm @jon @transitous but (presumably?) one can buy a single ticket for the whole night train journey, and if so that ticket would (very likely) be purchaseable directly at one (or both) of the operators. Meaning the operators must know about each other's data to some extent, no?
(Maybe only the ticketing department has access not the timetable department, maybe only ticket counters have access not the website, but that's all a question of data management *within* an operator, no?)
@cycling_on_rails Well, it kinda depends. Each operator’s sales systems might have data about the other country because that system use Merits data (after integration with the other countries). I don’t know exact details here though. But I do know that in practice some operators don’t export outside their own borders.
Not sure if this is the hill to die on anyway, because even if all data was published continuous, now you have deduplication to do as the integration instead