Thomas You comment that York doesn't appear to be aware of the stoparea principle ... this is widespread. There are no downstream national applications that make use of stopareas - and no pressure, therefore, to create stoparea data. In the areas of South and East England (SE, EM and EA regions on traveline) which (from this week) will be working with a combined multi-region database which also includes London, our system handles stopareas in two ways : - explicit stopareas contained in NaPTAN records, and - implicit stopareas created from the stoppoint records where stoppoints have identical commonnames and are within certain proximity limits of each other (a span of 150m for two stoppoints, or 250m for three or more stoppoints) This "implicit stoparea" process means that the stoparea data maintains itself when stoppoint data is maintained according to the rules - and works well for us. But it is an approach which works only with our particular supplier's data import processes each week. Where implicit stopareas exist in our regional journey planner they do not appear in NaPTAN and cannot be used in any other system (unless they apply the same rules when importing stoppoint data from NaPTAN).
I would counsel the use of care with stopareas, therefore - as they are not widely used. You also referred to "national" stopareas - those with prefixes which begin with 9 and refer to Rail Stations, Airports, Ferry ports and Tram/Metro/LightRail stations. The existence of these stopareas is indeed in the relevant "national" area database - but they can also contain stopareas or stoppoints from local geographical data. Again the use of this is most significant in the SE, EM and regions - as these relationships define locations at which interchange can take place in the regional journey planner. I am not aware of any other regions where this is significant. Finally, I should note that because EM and EA are changing system supplier and adopting a system which relies completely on NaPTAN, a lot of data editing and improvement is going on in both regions (and will continue to do so for some time yet). So, although the development of the process of importing NaPTAN data should go ahead now, I will recommend that a fresh download of data is supplied in due course so that the current phase of data improvements in these regions in particular are captured when it is appropriate to do so. Best wishes RogerS 2009/3/1 Thomas Wood <[email protected]>: > 2009/2/28 Brian Prangle <[email protected]>: > In other news, whilst on the train to (and from) York today, I wrote a > sizable chunk of the StopArea code for the converter. It's in a mostly > working state, the only issues I have to work out are StopArea > hierarchies, particularly when a StopArea is defined in another > region's dataset, the national rail one, for example. > I'm either going to have to do a mass convert of the whole dataset at > once (which I'm not looking forward to, since I suspect the memory use > will skyrocket), or try and resolve the dependencies by parsing the > national datasets to get a hash of all the StopAreas, and then append > on the county level StopAreas as and when they're created, finally we > can then upload the national StopArea points, as and when we get > around to those types of data. (AIrports, NatRail, to name a few) Whilst in York, I was able to photograph some bus stops, I've done a quick comparison of the data, it seems to be the worst in terms of standards compliance so far, but seems to be quite self consistent, which is a small bonus. Why quote the above? Well, it seems that York is unaware of the existance of the StopArea principle. (At least, I couldn't find it in a quick grepping of the data). http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/NaPTAN/Local_schemes#York -- Regards, Thomas Wood (Edgemaster) _______________________________________________ Talk-transit mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-transit _______________________________________________ Talk-transit mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-transit
