Two years after I harrangued the Dutch national railways on radio about their closed data policy and debunked all their arguments why they would not open up this data.
This month the NS opened up their data via an official API. And one of the first applications is this live train map of the Netherlands which is just wonderful. It simply exposes something that we knew implicitly and displays it very fluently.
This is just one of the many open data dominoes falling this year, but a very nice one and yes it looks like victory is within our grasp.
I guess I must be missing something, but isn’t it so that the API only offers some static information about ticket price, stations, travel advice, etc., but not real-time train location data? I mean, I would love to work with real-time train location data, but I can’t seem to find it in the API, at least not in their documentation. Any hints?
@Jan Willem: I actually do not know who made the real-time train map, but I would be very interested to hear about it’s provenance and making.