Hi,
One of the problems I have with the whole RSS 'phenomenon' is simply
that it becomes all too quickly an exercise in displaying information
with varying degrees of success without actually having much point to it
other than an interesting technical exercise in hacking together such
feeds with applications like Google Maps & Flickr.
That is not to say I don't find the expanding frontiership many on this
list and others are engaged in extremely interesting - however I am more
interested in the practical and usable applications of such
technologies, and I'm sure I am not alone.
To that end, I thought I'd give you a heads up of a project that is
going live nationwide on 21st June (all things being equal) which
combines custom GPS equipped vehicles, Greater London, and the BBC
traffic feeds. Each vehicle is required to give a new positional update
every 60 seconds, with 'last valid' updates being taken into account
every 15 minutes. At the same time, the BBC traffic feeds are monitored
by an 'intelligent' algorithm that can match GPS positional updates with
reported traffic problems and alert the technical team (it is important
for the purposes of this project that these vehicles are moving around).
Obviously I can't spell it out as to the nature of the project, but once
the holding site goes up, I'll point you in its direction; after the
project is completed, we will be releasing the GPS position / traffic
RSS matching algorithm, which might be useful to some of you.
Regards,
Chris.
