As Paul Clarke has pointed out on his blog, not once, but twice, “I assert that train operators know where their assets are: it would be irresponsible if they didn’t. And that this information is held within their internal systems“.
Here’s a good use case for his proposed solution … wheresmytrain …
Piccadilly Circus Tube station, Bakerloo Line southbound platform, round about 5.00 PM. The dot matrix displays tell us … that a train is “held” somewhere but with no information as to what this means. The platform announcer tells us “the Bakerloo Line is currently suspended” and immediately afterwards the “control room” tells us that “a good service is currently running on all London Underground lines“.
One is these statements should be correct, the other two should not be. By means of resolution, an Elephant and Castle train turned up 2 minutes after all of this has occurred, making all three of the above statements erroneous.
Another Piece Of Bloggage By Gary
Self professed "geek with a life", geo-blogger, geo-talker and geo-tweeter, Gary works in London and Berlin as Director of the Places Registry for Nokia; he's a co-founder of WhereCamp EU, the chair of w3gconf and sits on the W3C POI Working Group and the UK Location User Group. A contributor to the Mapstraction mapping API, Gary speaks and presents at a wide range of conferences and events including Where 2.0, State of the Map, AGI GeoCommunity, Geo-Loco, Social-Loco, GeoMob, the BCS GeoSpatial SG and LocBiz. Writing as regularly as possible on location, place, maps and other facets of geography, Gary blogs at www.vicchi.org and tweets as @vicchi.
Mail | Web | Twitter | Facebook | LinkedIn | Google+ | More Posts (271)Other bloggage that may or may not be geo-related to this one:
- Where’s My Tube Train? Ah, There’s My Tube Train
Back in December of 2009, I wrote about Paul Clarke trying to solve the problem of where’s my train; that there must be a definitive, raw source of real-time (train) information...
- Service Suspended On The London Underground (API)
If you build it they will come. Or to put it another way, sometimes demand outstrips supply. After the phenomenal success of the Transport For London Tube API, the London...
- “But if you tell people what’s going on they’re going to expect it in the future”
Next time you head out of London’s Waterloo station keep your eyes peeled as you come through the ticket barriers; if you’re lucky you’ll see one of the small display...
- Reaching The Limits Of Unlimited
Consider for a moment the word unlimited; it’s an adjective and, if you’ll pardon the condescension, it means the following: not limited; unrestricted; unconfined boundless; infinite; vast without any qualification...
- The Evolution of Geotastic!
Sadly the domain geotastic.com is already taken but even so a Google search on “gary gale geotastic” shows www.garygale.com as the prime hit (and we’ll just conveniently gloss over the...
