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 @stefanlindbohm @transitous the operators have it. But the GTFS files are incomplete. Merits has it, correctly, too.
@jon @cycling_on_rails @transitous Merits has it because of the integration process that is run on input data from each country. The input data is in this regard similar to what NAP’s give for each country.
Martin Hoffmann@stefanlindbohm @jon @cycling_on_rails @transitous I imagine the NeTEx data might be better in this regard and more suitable for integration work?
@partim Yep. NeTEx is hell to work with, but it does support A LOT richer data. Like for example marking a scheduled point as a non-passenger border crossing.