Re: New BP (?) - Using standards for distributing datasets for specific domains or applications

Hi Laufer, all,

Indeed the format aspect of GTFS seems out of scope. But the consensus/vocabulary aspect is interesting for BP 16 "Use standardized terms". Including the fact that it's not linked data. This gives the opportunity to show diversity and highlight difference of approaches.

Here's the example I propose to add there:
[
Google maintains a General Transit Feed Specification that defines a format for publishing public transportation data. This format relies on a set of fields like route_short_name or route_type that are carefully defined and exposed to constant community feedback in order to facilitate consensus, which leads to easier adoption and greater interoperability. Definitions include specifications of coded values for some fields, as in the following extract for route_type codes:

0 - Tram, Streetcar, Light rail. Any light rail or street level system within a metropolitan area.
1 - Subway, Metro. Any underground rail system within a metropolitan area.
2 - Rail. Used for intercity or long-distance travel.

Note that in a non-linked data fashion, these fields and codes have no individual Web identifiers nor machine-readable semantics. Exploiting them thus requires implementers to parse the documentation and encode interpretations in each individual application consuming the data.
]

Pull request at https://github.com/w3c/dwbp/pull/313

Antoine

On 3/4/16 4:44 PM, Laufer wrote:
> Hi All,
> I do not know if this should be a new BP, if it could be incorporated to the BP about standardized terms, or should be thought as an extension included in a BP document of another group. Or none of them.
>
> The inspiration came from GTFS (https://developers.google.com/transit/gtfs/), a standard way of defining timetables.
>
> Here are some extractions from the GTFS site:
>
> “The General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS) defines a common format for public transportation schedules and associated geographic information. GTFS "feeds" allow public transit agencies to publish their transit data and developers to write applications that consume that data in an interoperable way.”
>
> “A GTFS feed is composed of a series of text (csv) files collected in a ZIP file. Each file models a particular aspect of transit information: stops, routes, trips, and other schedule data. A transit agency can produce a GTFS feed to share their public transit information with developers, who write tools that consume GTFS feeds to incorporate public transit information into their applications. GTFS can be used to power trip planners, time table publishers, and a variety of applications, too diverse to list here, that use public transit information in some way.”
>
> It is more than the vocabulary used. It is also a specific way of distributing the dataset. Could we call this a kind of standard dataset type?
>
> Does it makes sense?
>
> Cheers, Laufer
>
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Received on Friday, 4 March 2016 17:09:49 UTC