GO_SYNC - A FRAMEWORK TO SYNCHRONIZE CROWD-SOURCED MAPPING CONTRIBUTIONS FROM ONLINE COMMUNITIES AND TRANSIT AGENCY BUS STOP INVENTORIES

摘要

Proprietary formats and licensing restrictions limit individuals from sharing, viewing, or updatinggeographic (e.g., map) datasets and also restrict the use of these data to create innovativelocation-based services. Open geographic data repositories are now emerging that do not havethese restrictions. The General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS) is a common open format forpublic transportation agencies’ schedules, routes, and geographic bus stop information. However,transit agencies struggle to internally maintain and update these very large official datasets.Meanwhile, OpenStreetMap.org (OSM), an online free-content “Wikipedia-like” repository ofgeographic data, currently has little information about U.S. public transportation, but does have alarge number of users willing to freely contribute their efforts to improve geographic data fortheir communities. This paper presents GO_Sync, a framework and open-source software tool forsynchronizing transit data between the transit agency’s official GTFS dataset and OSM.GO_Sync connects the wealth of data from GTFS datasets with the ability of the OSMcommunity to contribute crowd-sourced improvements to large datasets. The GO_Sync tooltherefore enables public transportation agencies to upload GTFS data to OSM and retrievecrowd-sourced data back, while the online community can edit and correct the bus stop locationsand amenities based on existing GTFS data. Successfully translating GTFS data into the OSMformat will enable over 125 transit agencies across the U.S. to share their public-domain datawith the OSM community.