very cool Toby!
Did you know there was a database of all public transport nodes in
the UK? http://www.naptan.org.uk/
Michael Smethurst pointed me at this lately: http://en.wikipedia.org/
wiki/TOPS which is interesting at the level of identifying rolling
stock (perhaps you don't want to go quite that far :-)
http://uktrains.pbworks.com/ has some good stuff too, including
twitter feeds, semi-related perhaps?
Libby
On 14 May 2009, at 12:19, Toby Inkster wrote:
I saw this on the linkeddata.org shopping list a few days ago, and
thought it would be a good thing to noodle with in my spare time. So
I've turned my screen scraping expertise at various railway-related
websites and put together this:
http://ontologi.es/rail/
It's still at a very early stage. Stations have URIs like:
http://ontologi.es/rail/stations/gb/VIC (London Victoria)
http://ontologi.es/rail/stations/gb/STP (London St Pancras)
http://ontologi.es/rail/stations/gb/MAN (Manchester Piccadilly)
http://ontologi.es/rail/stations/gb/LIV (Liverpool Lime Street)
If you know a station's three-letter Computer Reservation System code,
then you should be able to work out its URI. (I don't have any
plans to
include data for other countries, but if anyone else is doing this,
I'm
happy to provide 303 redirects.)
Data is published in XHTML+RDFa, but server-side scripts are on
hand to
translate to RDF/XML, Turtle, N-Triples and JSON if you hit those URIs
with the proper HTTP Accept header magic. (Or if you can't be bothered
to set the Accept header, then a simple '.ttl', '.nt', '.rdf' or
'.json'
at the end will do the trick.)
This is still a fairly early draft. I plan on including some
geonames.org links from each station to the town it serves. There are
owl:sameAs links to dbpedia.org (though some of these hit redirect
pages, so some work is still needed). The "facilities" area is also
going to be improved. I'd be happy to receive suggestions as to what
other improvements people would like.
As part of the same project, I've created a rail vocabulary:
http://ontologi.es/rail/vocab#
Terms that people might find useful are:
* rail:nearest_station
The nearest station to a geo:SpatialThing.
* rail:home_station
The station a foaf:Agent considers to be 'home'.
(This is more appropriate than rail:nearest_station
for people - people are capable of motion, so their
rail:nearest_station can vary with time!)
-Toby
