It’s an exciting day for ITO World as our latest project with Google Maps has gone live this morning. We have been working with Google for the past few months to convert live London Underground data from Transport for London (TfL) into a format suitable for use in Google Transit.
To try the feature, visit Google Maps and click the ‘Get directions’ button, select the public transit icon and search for a journey in London that uses the Underground. You will then be presented with the best route option and will be redirected onto an alternative route if there are delays, interruptions or closures on your planned journey.
Live alerts on Google Maps, with a little help from ITO!
We have been working with Google for nearly a year now. We were initially contracted to convert TfL static schedules into an appropriate format for Google Transit which we have been doing on a weekly basis since then. This latest project, however, integrates TfL’s planned engineering works feed and Tube disruptions feed into their new 'real-time' Google Transit service. Google expect millions of people to benefit from this feature during the Olympics.
Google Maps users can avoid Tube disruption using the Transit feature
All this has been made possible by TfL’s switch to Open Data over the past year which has been being championed by the Mayor of London and his team. Anyone who has been following us will know that we are firm supporters of Open Data and have worked with the Mayor’s office previously. We are particularly proud to have one of our visuals displayed on the London Data Store homepage banner!
We are proud to announce that our work has been displayed at this year's TED conference, where the world's greatest thinkers and doers come together. We were asked to provide visualisations that helped tell the story of open data in 2009, for Sir Tim Berners-Lee to give an update on open data since his talk last year.
We chose to tell the story of 'OpenStreetMap - Project Haiti'.
We all followed the crisis that unfolded following the Haiti earthquake, many of us chose to donate money, a few were flown out and deployed as part of the relief effort. But what practical impact can many have without being there in Haiti itself? Well, during this crisis a remarkable story unfolded; of how people around the world could virtually collaborate and contribute to the on-the-ground operations.
With the little existing physical, political and social infrastructure now destroyed or damaged, the situation was especially challenging for aid agencies arriving on the ground. Where are the areas most in need of assistance, how do we get there, where are people trapped under buildings, which roads are blocked? This information is important to the rescue agencies immediately after the event, and to the longer rebuilding process. In many developing countries, there is a lack of good mapping data and particularly after a crisis, when up-to-date information is critical to managing events as they evolve.
Enter OpenStreetMap, the wiki map of the world, CrisisMappers and an impromptu community of volunteers who collaborated to produce the most authoritative map of Haiti in existence. Within hours of the event people were adding detail to the map, but on January 14th high resolution sattelite imagery of Haiti was made freely available and the Crisis Mapping community were able to trace roads, damaged buildings, and enter camps of displaced people into OpenStreetMap. This is the story of OpenStreetMap - Project Haiti:
Each flash represents a new edit into OpenStreetMap, and this visualisation is a vivid picture of how much work was contributed by volunteers, following the quake. First the primary and secondary roads (green and red) are added and then smaller residential streets and many other features such as the blue glowing camps of displaced people that emerge.
Its not all about OpenStreetMap however, a variety of organisations provided technical solutions with vital services, such as Ushahidi - a service where anyone in Haiti can send an SMS message with their location and report an emergency or need. All this information is then aggregated and publicly displayed in near real-time, on a platform that almost anyone can use.
With all the talk of open data and the launch of Data.gov.uk, its very easy for us to get excited about the release of huge tranches of government data, but means little to anyone else. We now have the potential for many new services that will bring tangible benefits, in this case for the crisis management of the Haiti Earthquake. After the crisis, thousands of people from all over the world were able to contribute and build what is now the most complete map of Haiti - in use on the ground by the United Nations, Ushahidi, and the default map of choice for NGOs. This picture says it all:
OpenStreetMap being used on a GPS unit for search and rescue in Haiti by Fairfax County Urban Search & Rescue Team
What does all this have to do with ITO World and transport? Well, we want to visualise and tell the story of transport - how does the network function, what is the story of your commute, how will this planning decision affect transport in my city? We are working on powerful analytical tools that will visualise the current status, and future scenarios of transport networks enabling us to make better decisions. By creating a narrative around transport, people can understand how and why decisions are being made, and collaborate to build a better transport system that meets their needs.
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