Transport things on the internet of things

17 Oct 2016 by Jonathan Raper

Thingful “A Search Engine for the Internet of Things”, has recently been working with us to index some of our transport data within their platform.

While the internet used to exist mainly on our computer screens, it is increasingly existing on connected devices. Not just smartphones, but also lamp-posts, kettles, rubbish bins and lots of transport assets. “Things” are getting smarter and more connected. Also the internet, our databases, our websites, apps and APIs, are starting to have data about “things” in the real world more and more. If that all seems rather vague, consider the challenge Thingful are setting themselves, to provide a search engine and an interlinked index into the internet of things. It’s a broad-sweeping vision!

For our part, we’re focussed on the realm of transport, our API has data on various types of real world things, which we organise with unique identifiers and provide at unique URLs. These include bus stops and train stations. We’re excited to be working with Thingful on meshing our data into the their indexes. For them we’re just one of many types of “thing” but, as explained on their blog, TransportAPI “goes as deep as it can go in normalising data and providing a unified interface, making it the most comprehensive access point for transportation data across the UK”.

So working with Thingful, we created a catalogue of bus stops, and train stations, and some of the data which we offer in relation to them. The catalogue files are at this url: http://transportapi.com/v3/cat/cat.json, and follow the “hypercat” standard (recently published as a British Standard). This has the potential to allow automated discovery, indexing and spidering of our data. Thingful are the first people to make use of it, but we hope they’ll be more. If you’re interested, take a look at the file and please feel free to contact us with any questions or suggestions.

As always, developers can delve into our API to find all of our rich timetable data and live transport data. We hope this new integration will allow developers to discover this data, via our new hypercat catalogue and via the Thingful platform.