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GO_Sync — A Framework to Synchronize Crowd-Sourced Mapping Contributors from Online Communities and Transit Agency Bus Stop Inventories

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Abstract

Proprietary formats and licensing restrictions limit individuals from sharing, viewing, or updating geographic (e.g., map) datasets and also restrict the use of these data to create innovative location-based services. Open geographic data repositories are now emerging that do not have these restrictions. The General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS) is a common open format for public 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 of geographic data, currently has little information about U.S. public transportation, but does have a large number of users willing to freely contribute their efforts to improve geographic data for their communities. This paper presents GO_Sync, a framework and open-source software tool for synchronizing 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 OSM community to contribute crowd-sourced improvements to large datasets. The GO_Sync tool therefore enables public transportation agencies to upload GTFS data to OSM and retrieve crowd-sourced data back, while the online community can edit and correct the bus stop locations and amenities based on existing GTFS data. Successfully translating GTFS data into the OSM format will enable over 125 transit agencies across the U.S. to share their public-domain data with the OSM community.

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Acknowledgment

This work was partially supported by the National Center for Transit Research and the Florida Department of Transportation under grant TWO 977–20 “Enabling Cost-Effective Multimodal Trip Planners through Open Source Transit Data” and the NSF Grant No. 0754537 “An REU Site in Computer Science and Engineering.”

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Center for Urban Transportation Research, University of South Florida, 4202 E. Fowler Avenue, CUT100, Tampa, FL, USA

    Sean Barbeau & Edward Hillsman

  2. Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of South Florida, 4202 E. Fowler Avenue, ENB100, Tampa, FL, USA

    Khoa Tran & Miguel A. Labrador

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  1. Khoa Tran
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  2. Sean Barbeau
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  3. Edward Hillsman
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  4. Miguel A. Labrador
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Correspondence to Khoa Tran.

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Tran, K., Barbeau, S., Hillsman, E. et al. GO_Sync — A Framework to Synchronize Crowd-Sourced Mapping Contributors from Online Communities and Transit Agency Bus Stop Inventories. Int. J. ITS Res. 11, 54–64 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13177-013-0056-x

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13177-013-0056-x

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