Swirrl

At the weekend, I attended the 2nd Lovely Data Hack Day, part of the 2011 FutureEverything conference and festival in Manchester.

For the first hack day, we had prepared a Linked Data site called LinkedManchester with the Transport for Greater Manchester bus timetable data from DataGM. In the week leading up to the event, Bill wrote an (almost) daily diary of how we went about producing the linked bus data: day1, day2, day3, days4-6.

As well as getting to meet more people interested in open data, it was good to catch up with people from the previous event, and see what they’d been up to with our Linked Data API. Ben Gibbs has continued to improve his GMBuses timetable site. And since the last hack day, David Bamber has come up with a nice mobile app called Nextbus (which also works well on modern browsers).

GMBuses

url: http://gmbuses.heroku.com
author: Ben Gibbs

Ben’s site allows you to select a route…

… then choose the individual stop you’re interested in…

… to get a personalised, printable timetable for that stop. The ‘greyed-out’ times are buses you’ve missed!

NextBus

url: http://bmbr.co/nextbus
author: David Bamber

Nextbus lets you geo-locate yourself…

… to find your nearest stops.

Selecting the route…

… provides you with the times for the next buses.

We’re really pleased to see that developers have been able to use our linked data and API to build great apps, without themselves having to go through the work of understanding and processing the raw data files. Thanks to Ben and David for some really useful feedback. David in particular was very flattering…

“The PublishMyData API was reliable, intuitive and quick. This meant that I could rapidly develop my application and concentrate on the user experience, without having to worry about the data.” – David Bamber, creator of NextBus.