Hi Friends, Some of you whom I've put in Bcc had signed up on the Datameet Pune interest form. While Craig is working on how to organize meetups (found a venue, planning dates etc), I'd like to share a collaborative task with you.
Here's something that some volunteer groups (ImproveMyCity, Pravasi Manch, Pimpri-Chinchwad Citizens Forum) are upto. IMC is building a website for PMPML (Pune's bus system), and we're helping PMPML put the bus routes info in a standardized common structure that can then be used for properly informing the public. We've had many roadblocks previously with this process and are now much wiser off it. There's an easy but repetitive task that we need to hammer out : we have a standardized list of bus stops in English with unique code and lat-long, which was formed and freely shared by an org called ITDP. And we have a separate longer list of bus stop names in Marathi which we'd gotten from an earlier unorganized dataset. We need to fill in the Marathi counterparts of the English stop names. I've put this all on this google spreadsheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ppFJeb7Dnj6-1yvniH2Q6exQFzK6fM0wsZNn4XZIvkI/edit?usp=sharing There are just under 1800 stops to bilingual-ize this way. So what you have to do: Play match-the-following, or type some Marathi words in. Simple! Please write back to me if you're interested in doing a set of rows for half an hour or so today, and I will add you to the doc as an editor. Target completion time: Sunday 5th July EOD. But if you can give some time today before 4pm that would be great, as we're meeting PMPML's CMD at that time to discuss on all this. He's recently taken charge and is very passionate about making all the information transparent and accessible to the public. -------------------------------------------- Why this is important : If you see the routes sheets in the same google spreadsheet, we're going to populate it with existing route info prepared by ITDP (a few years old), and have PMPML staff edit and update the route information using this core list of bus stops. When adding a new stop in a route, it's got to be linked to other stop info like stopcode, lat-long. Building up this way, with properly cross-linked information instead of arbitrary entries, will then enable all the information management features one needs from a modern public transport service. Some background: These exercises had been done in the past, but the technologies used, the core data like this, etc wasn't properly shared or passed on, and PMPML themselves weren't involved and so never had the standardized stuff in their systems. A GTFS (that google maps uses) feed was created, but that's basically not human-manageable.. the main datafile is around 6 lakh lines long. So now we want to do things differently. A very important component here is OPEN data, and transparency at the input end. This data format that we've commonly agreed upon is both human and machine readable, and once set up, will be a lot easier to maintain. PMPML will have constant direct access to the system and they will be able to edit the data themselves as soon as there are changes from their end. It would be great to have a full-on database-powered system.. I am clueless on that but knew a few excel hacks so am doing it this way. If YOU have the skills to drum something up then welcome aboard! ------------------------------- Coming back, breaking it down to simple parts : The task for right now is just to fill Marathi names for each bus stop. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ppFJeb7Dnj6-1yvniH2Q6exQFzK6fM0wsZNn4XZIvkI/edit?usp=sharing -- -- Cheers, Nikhil +91-966-583-1250 Pune, India Self-designed learner at Swaraj University <http://www.swarajuniversity.org> http://nikhilsheth.blogspot.in -- Datameet is a community of Data Science enthusiasts in India. Know more about us by visiting http://datameet.org --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "datameet" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to datameet+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
