Commuters in the city may soon have a variety of choices to access information on public transport in the city and across the State. The Bangalore Metropolitan Transport Corporation and the Karnataka State Road Transport Corporation are preparing to make data from their intelligent transport system projects available publicly.
The benefits are many. From apps that focus on trip planning to data mining to monitor the flow of people from one city to another, open data access will throw open a number of doors, officials are hoping. For commuters, this might even mean knowing how crowded buses are likely to be based on ticket sales.
Over the past two months, KSRTC and BMTC have installed GPS-based vehicle-tracking systems and have launched command and control centres to monitor and track the movement of buses. For city commuters, BMTC has also launched an app with real-time information on buses. The aim now is to take it one step further by making data available for app developers, officials say. “We are in the process of drafting a data-sharing policy. The intent is to share all possible data from ITS. It will be released in a phased manner with static information like geocodes of bus stations being made available before real-time information is released,” said Biswajit Mishra, director (IT), BMTC.
The corporations are being assisted in this open source data effort by a team from the World Bank that works with big data. “We have had video conferences and debated means through which data could be released. The KSRTC is looking at a hackathon in which data collected over the years will be made available, both static and real-time,” said KSRTC managing director Rajender Kumar Kataria.
There were some issues in chalking out which data could be released to the public, however, and the corporations were advised by experts from World Bank, the International Institute of Information Technology, Bengaluru, and the Centre for Infrastructure, Sustainable Transportation and Urban Planning.
“The challenges included preparing for the additional load on our servers. We are working on intermediate servers where the data will be pushed to,” Mr. Kataria said. The KSRTC is expected to announce a calendar of events followed by a hackathon sometime next month.
What data
BMTC
Vehicles under ITS: 6,417; facilities available: real-time bus tracking, bus information system, route monitoring; type of data: static data such as geocodes for bus stands; real-time data such as bus location, ticket sales
KSRTC
Vehicles under Vehicle Tracking Management System: 2,000; type of data: Static and live
