Hi everybody. I'm here to present the mobility database. I'm Isabelle de Robert. I work for mobility
data as a regional director for Europe. I'm Basin Barcelona. I speak English, French and a
bit of Spanish. It's working progress. So if there are any native speakers in Spanish come
to talk to me after I need to practice. And the reason I do this work is to make sustainable
transport. I forgot to put transport. The easiest choice. I'm sure all of you take public transport
as a principle already. I try, but I'm also a bit lazy and sometimes I need to choose between
the easiest or the most sustainable often actually. And so my goal is to make sustainable
transport the easiest for other lazy people like me. So who is mobility data? Who knows about
mobility data in the room? Oh, nice. I was expecting a lot less. We're global non-profit, HQ
in Montreal, Canada. We're about 25 people. And we govern open data formats. All of you might
know GTFS and GBFS. So we govern these standards. And something you might not know is that
we also have a software engineering team that builds free and open source tools for the
community of users. Our goal as an organization is to empower sustainable mobility stakeholders
to make the best of their data, their digital assets. So you might already know GTFS and
GBFS and what we call diffact standard. So it means a format or a specification that becomes
a standard because of its worldwide adoption. So this is the network between GTFS, GBFS for
shared mobility, shared modes, bike share, scooter share, car share. A lot of the work has
been done in Europe to build this format because the market is big in Europe. And about
a thousand show mobility operators use this format today. And what they do is they handle the
well, okay, they handle the communication between the operators and the general public using
the service. So they represent writer-facing information. Nothing kind of operational. It's
really meant to share information to the public using the service. Most of the time if you
are trip-learning apps. So these are a few examples. There's a huge open source community
between these two formats. There is an official GitHub and Slack for GTFS, GBFS. We're
maintaining the Slack. But there is also a very big community of folks building open source software.
We also have a list we've had for a while called Awesome Transit and we should link the two links
somehow. And we try to keep up with all of the tools that are available with the focus on free
and open source. There is no rules to this list. Anyone can add their tool. If there is one
user or thousands of users, it's hard to keep up. So if you see tools that are not there,
if you build tools, please add them to this list. We try to maintain it and keep it up to date.
So before introducing the mobility database, I want to talk about the problem. It's meant to
solve. We talked a little bit about the quality of the data. Sorry for the Google map screen shot.
I know it's bad to bring that in an open source conference. But the point is that often times this happens
so often we are stressed when we take public transport. We don't know what to do with this information.
Having bad data, sometimes it's worse than having no data. It reduces the trust. People
having the service creates a lot of complaints. The people that can afford to take a taxi, they take
a taxi and the one that can't take their right way to work. They are very stressed.
It takes a whole industry to improve data quality. Originally, I didn't have policy makers here
and I feel very ashamed. When you spoke, I added policy makers. Because in the open source system,
we are a bit outside of what's happening in policy. I find, and so I'm very glad you're here
and I'm sorry that I didn't put policy makers on this slide in our ecosystem. It's more
the industry. So the public transport authority is the technology partners, the trip planners.
I take a commitment to collaborate more with policy makers in Europe, especially.
So why do we have this bad experience in the world? Everything is digital. We can do everything with AI.
And when we take the bus, we have wrong information. The best doesn't show up.
It's very hard to translate data into a problem for the writer. So when the bus doesn't show up,
it's a real experience. But when you see a data set, it's hard to trace and to be able to say,
well, this will lead in a bad writer experience. Sometimes it's a bit obscure. We don't know how to
measure data quality. We don't have tools to measure it. We have accountability issues of 10 times
between the operator and your up. There is five intermediaries in Europe. There are the national
access points that are supposed to help with all of this. It also adds another stakeholder. Sometimes
they point fingers. You're responsible. You're responsible. We don't know who's responsible
for the data quality. So the solution, one solution is a product to be able to encode the mobility
database. So it's an open data platform containing data in the GTFS and GBFS format, essentially.
It's free to open source. Currently it has data from 4,500 sources, 75 countries.
And the reason we build this platform is the data quality. I know we talked about availability.
But it's the main thing we're trying to solve with it. And so each feed contains data quality
reports. Our team also builds validators that evaluate the quality of GTFS and GBFS data and
provide this official way to measure the quality. It is required in some places to use these tools.
Here's an example of what a page looks like. So the metadata, I would say on the left,
license, contact information and the features that are included. Is it only timetable? Or is it
only accessibility information, fairs, etc. It links to documentation with just release visualizations
last year. So these you can zoom in and out and be able to kind of see what the data looks like
in practice. And the assumption is to try to make people understand the impact of having data
problems. And we have the compliance reports according to the spec, not the law, in that case.
And the value of this product is to make this data available for many users.
So we have the cities that can use it for all of the planning. They need to do different scenarios.
We have collaborations with the national law access points. We exchange data. Some of them
have integrated our tooling within their platforms. Of course researchers, transport operators
can use it to check the quality of their feed. Maybe longer term is their data reused.
For example, it's something we could add writer applications.
So it has the reports from the official validators that we maintain. We have one for
GTFS schedule. We also have one for GTFS rule time. It's not yet integrated.
We have one for GTFS. It has visualization to troubleshoot problems. You can see kind of the location
of the stops. The weather shape is a lot of metadata, historical data is also available
or historical versions of the data for GTFS schedule only.
And they are widely used. We have a lot of contributors. We have our team, but we are
as an open source project. There is also a lot of people contributing. And we are lucky to have
a lot of them. But we struggle with keeping this platform up to date. These are some of our
issues. I'm sure that any of you building products on open data are facing similar ones.
The feed become inactive. We don't know if there is a replacement. We don't know what the
license is or the license is unclear. It completes data sources. You mentioned some aggregate. Sometimes
you have a address of a bad aggregate or incomplete small local sources. We don't know if the
source is official. Is it maintained? Or is it an awesome contributor that did it for Hackaton?
But then they don't do anything with it anymore. No coverage in certain areas, certain countries.
We have no feed at all. And so I'm lucky to be in a room full of developers to present this.
And so I couldn't help but to prompt you to support this project. I imagine you come from many
different places in Europe. So I encourage you to go on the platform to look if there is the data
from your city or from your country. Check the quality. Bring it to the transport authority.
If they don't know about it, add a missing feed. If you know of a feed that is missing,
replacing outdated source. It's all on GitHub, open issues, whether from missing data,
problems with the quality. It helps us also go to the official source and say people are complaining
about your source and it's not only us saying it. And open each GitHub issue. Also your ideas
on how to improve the platform, new features and functionalities that we will make it useful for you.
And for the time that is left, I encourage you to go ahead and open it. The people that have
their computers. I'm going to show a little demo but go ahead. I won't be mad if you go on your
laptops or on your phones. Open it, browse it and I will show a little demo. I think it's my last
slide. How many minutes? 5 minutes left. Here's what it looks like. I'll make it a bit bigger.
And I'll put TMB in Barcelona. So this is what the page looks like. We know it's an official feed,
so it means they have confirmed that the source is maintained by them. We can download the GTFS.
We can open the quality report with issues in the data.
We are to download the service range. So some of the things we are thinking about doing is, for example,
sending notifications. When the feed is about to expire, because having the feed expiring and not
having replacement is actually a major problem we have. Which features are included. So here we
can see they have, for example, wheelchair accessibility. We can click on it and get to the documentation.
Another thing we're thinking about doing is adding what features could be included. If one feed
only has minimum information, we can say, hey, you could add accessibility here's the documentation.
And this is the big new thing, the visualization. So I'd also open them up.
And I think we'll do just with subways and metro. And this shows the shapes.
So the form that the writer seen a trip planner and the location of the stops.
And that's it. I want to keep time for questions. How much time do you have?
There should be. Let's check. But maybe if you type STIBs, how you find it.
Normally, if you type bristles, you should, you should write, why am I?
Yeah. Here's the feed for bristles. Or for the STIB. Any questions? Yes.
I'm wondering, do you have an example of an unofficial feed that is like trust him by the community?
Yes. The feeds from, well, we removed them now, but we had some from GTFS.BE. It's a platform actually in Belgium.
That we're making the Belgium feeds available without a login because you need it to sign a PDF document.
But now it's not the case anymore. So we remove them. But that's an example.
Me, the same thing. Sorry. For example, a couple of people would be still chairing about the transit and sometimes they say,
oh, this is wheelchair accessibility and they get there and they do. So do you look at, sort of like,
crowdsourced information or did just the feed from that transparency? We take both our philosophies to add
all of the data sources. We have either crowdsource or official or aggregates, disaggregate,
but just document it so people can choose. And then, um, with regards to being able to compare
feed with each other, we our validator measures what is included in the data. And so when we say the
data has wheelchair accessibility, it will mean the same thing in every country. If the producer says
it, or if the if the producers and the consumers use the same tool that measures it, then they have the same
definition. Okay. Yes. And then you. Yes. And then you. Yes.
So, I'm going to say to happen this, are you actually consuming the data? Well, we are
pointing to the feed. We are consuming to build this platform, but we don't build any additional service.
We are consuming to to display them, but we don't, um, we don't have, I don't have an API on the data.
No, we do have an API, so that's not completely accurate. And we have a stable ID as well.
So, um, so, for example, in France, we rely on the national access point to transport a
taggov. And so, they, with the ill-defrost mobility, they have, uh, they have a stable ID. So,
if you look, and they are in touch with ill-defrost mobility, they are the person. And then we,
we provide an URL, uh, based on the transport a taggov feed.
In that case, how do you deal with licensing? We have something up. I mean, I do really
get info about data that they license. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So, whatever opinions people might
have on the weaknesses in France, well, can I say five questions or? Also, I want you to be able
to ask us your hand the whole time. But we, um, GTFS and NetAx, it's obviously from both the
presentation, the EU guy, but NetAx says the way that things will be going in the EU.
Yeah. Does your tool have any support for NetAx, or are you planning to do this? Because having
something like this that breaks the quality of NetAx means what would be very useful.
We, yes, some people ask us, we consider it. But we govern this format. And so,
from a product perspective, it could make sense, but we also use the mobility that are
based, uh, more selfishly to analyze and then make changes to the standard based on what we see,
which we cannot really do in the text. And so, but it's possible, but currently it's not really
a short-term plan, no. Yeah, we did not go a project there. It's about to be a waste of that purpose.
Oh, cool. But we could operate as much as, as much as we can. Yeah. Okay. Sorry.