Small improvements made to ITO NaPTAN tool after user feedback

ITO NaPTAN tool now has a number of small further improvements in response to user feedback. Please use the link at the bottom of each page to give feedback.  The timing status of the stop in NaPTAN is now shown and DEL stops are marked with an X so they are visible if directly underneath an active stop.  The full stop name format is used in search results and the locality boundary band is drawn around the ACTive stops but not the DELeted stops which may, through an error, be some distance from the locality.

ITO NaPTAN Tool DEL Stop Warnings Update

The ITO NaPTAN tool has been updated so that all warnings involving DEL (deleted) stops are now counted as resolved. This makes the current trend statistics comparable to the week of the 22nd September.

ITO NaPTAN tool upgraded

Following the decision to close Transport Direct, the DfT approached ITO world to help existing users of the NaPTAN Viewer to transfer to the ITO NaPTAN tool.

Some features familiar to users of the NaPTAN Viewer can now be found with the ITO NaPTAN tool.  Stops marked as deleted (DEL) now appear in searches and, optionally, on the ITO map browser.  The Full Name is now presented in an expanded form to encourage consistent use of the naming standard for bus stops.  At the same time the base mapping has been updated.   Please use the "Problem or comments" link - bottom right of each page - to give any feedback you have.

ITO World unveil radical new data tool at Transport Systems Catapult Imagine Festival

ITO World previewed a radical new data visualisation tool it is developing for transport professionals at a major industry event in Milton Keynes.  The two-week Imagine Festival was organised by the Government’s Transport Systems Catapult initiative to explore the concept of “intelligent mobility” within the future of transport policy and planning.

ITO World revealed the first details of a new business intelligence aid developed to help planners, policy makers, operators and modelers understand how transport networks function at present, how they have performed in the past and how they might operate in the future.  

The platform, which will be available to the industry later this year, will provide transport professionals with the power to interrogate and explore big datasets, visualise models, identify and report key trends, explore and diagnose causal factors and report on and share the resulting insights gained.

A demonstration of some of the tool’s capabilities featured in a video which was shown at the festival, presenting real-time, “action replay” and infographic views of the strategic road network − the results of the initial stage of a collaboration between ITO World and the Transport Systems Catapult.

Google introduces comprehensive GB public transport journey planning

You may well have noticed Google’s recent announcement that they are now offering comprehensive GB public transport journey planning through Google Maps.  This latest initiative is their largest single integration of transit data anywhere in the world to date.

ITO World is proud to have been a key data partner in this project, with a role in refining, augmenting and customising the Traveline TNDS data in order to meet Google’s requirements.

We believe this is an important step forward for all of us and for people wishing to travel. It will ensure that GB public transport information is easily accessed by millions of people via their computers and mobile devices on a daily basis. Media coverage of the launch has been extensive and it was the top story on BBC’s technology news for most of the week:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-27394691

Improving public transport data quality in the UK

We are giving advance notice of a new free data quality service from ITO, to assist with the further improvement of the quality of the UK’s public transport data.

ITO has worked with Traveline and Transport Direct for several years to provide the public transport data improvement services to the professional transport sector. In particular our ‘ITO NaPTAN’ and ‘ITO Quality’ services, which have supported a considerable improvement in the quality of data in a number of key areas.

There is however much still more that can be done. To support this, ITO will soon launch a new schedule quality service, which will incorporate new checks and have a clearer user interface. In particular, it will be easier to identify:

• missing stops and wrong bearings
• variation in times between services linking the same stops
• conflicting information provided by different parties for cross-boundary services
• errors with dates and date ranges
• issues relating to school services and school dates

This service will be available to professional users without charge, and ITO will provide uninterrupted access to the current service in the interim, using your existing ITO Quality user credentials.

We appreciate and acknowledge continued support from Traveline and the DfT for the NaPTAN service, which will be unaffected by this change.