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Ruben Verborgh

Publishing Public Transport Data on the Web with the Linked Connections Framework

Julián Rojas Meléndez, Harm Delva, Pieter Colpaert, and Ruben Verborgh

Publishing transport data on the Web for consumption by others poses several challenges for data publishers. In addition to planned schedules, access to live schedule updates (e.g. delays or cancellations) and historical data is fundamental to enable reliable applications and to support machine learning use cases. However publishing such dynamic data further increases the computational burden for data publishers, resulting in often unavailable historical data and live schedule updates for most public transport networks. In this paper we apply and extend the current Linked Connections approach for static data to also support cost-efficient live and historical public transport data publishing on the Web. Our contributions include (i) a reference specification and system architecture to support cost-efficient publishing of dynamic public transport schedules and historical data; (ii) empirical evaluations on route planning query performance based on data fragmentation size, publishing costs and a comparison with a traditional route planning engine such as OpenTripPlanner; (iii) an analysis of potential correlations of query performance with particular public transport network characteristics such as size, average degree, density, clustering coefficient and average connection duration. Results confirm that fragmentation size influences route planning query performance and converges on an optimal fragment size per network. Size (stops), density and connection duration also show correlation with route planning query performance. Our approach proves to be more cost-efficient and in some cases outperforms OpenTripPlanner when supporting the earliest arrival time route planning use case. Moreover, the cost of publishing live and historical schedules remains in the same order of magnitude for server-side resources compared to publishing planned schedules only. Yet, further optimizations are needed for larger networks (> 1000 stops) to be useful in practice. Additional dataset fragmentation strategies (e.g. geospatial) may be studied for designing more scalable and performant Web API s that adapt to particular use cases, not only limited to the public transport domain.

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Published in 2022 in Semantic Web Journal.

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Cite this article easily using its BibTeX entry: 

@article{rojas_swj_2023,
  author = {Rojas Mel\'endez, Juli\'an and Delva, Harm and Colpaert, Pieter and Verborgh, Ruben},
  title = {Publishing Public Transport Data on the {Web} with the {Linked Connections} Framework},
  journal = {Semantic Web Journal},
  year = 2022,
  month = apr,
  volume = 14,
  issue = 4,
  pages = {659--693},
  publisher = {IOS Press},
  url = {https://content.iospress.com/articles/semantic-web/sw223116},
  doi = {10.3233/SW-223116},
}

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ACM
Julián Rojas Meléndez, Harm Delva, Pieter Colpaert, and Ruben Verborgh. 2022. Publishing Public Transport Data on the Web with the Linked Connections Framework. Semantic Web Journal 14, 4 (April 2022), 659–693.
APA
Rojas Meléndez, J., Delva, H., Colpaert, P., & Verborgh, R. (2022). Publishing Public Transport Data on the Web with the Linked Connections Framework. Semantic Web Journal, 14(4), 659–693.
IEEE
J. Rojas Meléndez, H. Delva, P. Colpaert, and R. Verborgh, “Publishing Public Transport Data on the Web with the Linked Connections Framework,” Semantic Web Journal, vol. 14, no. 4, pp. 659–693, Apr. 2022.
LNCS
Rojas Meléndez, J., Delva, H., Colpaert, P., Verborgh, R.: Publishing Public Transport Data on the Web with the Linked Connections Framework. Semantic Web Journal. 14, 659–693 (2022).
MLA
Rojas Meléndez, Julián, et al. “Publishing Public Transport Data on the Web with the Linked Connections Framework.” Semantic Web Journal, vol. 14, no. 4, IOS Press, Apr. 2022, pp. 659–93.

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