On Fri, Dec 19, 2008 at 2:41 PM, Nick Whitelegg <[email protected]> wrote: >>You can't crowdsource a timetable. You can't crowdsource the future >>without objective evidence. > >>You can, however, crowdsource what has happened in the past, and use >>it to make list of when the trains usually used to run. But I have >>absolutely no interest in an application that says "trains usually ran >>on a Sunday at 10.35am up until last weekend" because I actually want >>to go *this* Sunday and I want to know when the trains are *going* to >>be running, which is in the future and the timetable changed this >>week[1]. > >>So as far as I'm concerned, the only really useful source of >>timetables is whoever operates the service. > > Whilst there may be copyright issues in doing this in practice, there is > in theory a good reason for having an independent source of timetable > data: you could offer web API functionality that the actual rail/bus > companies are not offering, which aids the integration of the data into > other sites. Also it allows the development of independent train/bus > journey planners which the individual companies may not wish to develop > themselves.
I'm not arguing that the timetable information shouldn't be made freely available, since I've got every confidence in the power of the crowds to come up with useful and novel things. I'm just saying that in the case of timetables, unlike the geodata that we're familiar with in OSM, I don't think it's crowd-sourceable. Unless we send people one at a time to the ticket office and say "what trains will leave between 10am and 11am this Sunday", note it in a PDA and re-join the back of the queue... Cheers, Andy _______________________________________________ talk mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
