What sense makes linked public transport data in osm?

General talk
1

Hi folks,
Some public transport stops like railway=station, railway=halt or highway=bus_stop are mapped with the following tags

  • Uic_ref
  • Wikidata
  • Wikipedia
  • Ref:ifopt

From studying Lower Saxony, I learned that all of these tags are more or less present. I can not say much about the mapping completeness of the uic_ref, Wikidata or Wikipedia tags. I do not see something close to a complete mapping of ref:ifopt for all of the above mentioned stops.

That is why I am wondering if it makes sense to you to map the available tags in OSM.

For instance, there is a national stop register for Germany that uses ref:ifopt. If all OSM stops include this unique identifier, we could compare OSM with this register to work on data quality on both sides.

Does this makes sense or is helpful?

All those above mentioned tags are also used in the Wikipedia world. Using those unique identifiers we could link OSM and a lot of Wikipedia services together achieving a linked data network.

Does this makes sense or is helpful?

Regarding the above mentioned German stop register, what do you think about a mass import from the register into OSM based on a fussy comparison using stop name, direction and coordinates? What import strategy would be your favourite?

Cheers!

2

Every extra piece of data is good, as long as it’s not something too obscure. There is no ‘helpfulness’ measure. As long as there is a justified need for such tagging, I would say it is helpful.

I think you should discuss this with the German community first. Mass imports are okay but you have to follow the guidelines: Import/Guidelines - OpenStreetMap Wiki.

3

First step is evaluating the quality of the data to be imported.
From my experience with GTFS: in general too bad for import. But I can’t judge on the stop register.
Holger from @mfdz did some exercises on comperison between stop register data and OSM.

On July 26, he presented some results on the OpenTransportMeetup. The presentations have been recorded, I don’t know where they have been stored though.

4

Here is the link: Playback