Add Download & use Real-time Traffic info. functionality.

Would be nice if free data is available. chris_debian: The BBC do a data feed, but the user has to enter the URL manually so as not to contravene BBC licensing. http://www.andnav.org/index.php/en/menu-andnav2-userguide/traffic-feeds

Looking at the BBC site, I can't see any mention of this weird restriction. I think Andnav's perspective is that the BBC only allows personal, non-commercial use so that's why they can't include it. Shouldn't be a problem for us though :)
Chris, can you confirm this for us? I only really want to accept this if it can be made easy for the user.

Thanks, Kizza. Will look into this.

Chris.

Email sent to BBC to confirm the licensing of the traffic feeds.

Still waiting to here from the BBC.

Finding a way to contact them was very difficult, as I kept being redirected to FAQ's. I did eventually find a way, but I have heard nothing.

URL for future reference:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/travelnews/about/tpeg/

Have posted a message at AndNav's site to see whether they know where the licence information is stored.

http://www.andnav.org/index.php/en/menu-andnav2-userguide/traffic-feeds

chris_debian

Think this may answer the question:

http://www.andnav.org/index.php/en/community-forum/topic?id=206

Kieran, could you have a look (as a second pair of eyes) and let me know what you think?

Cheers,

chris_debian

The license seems fine to me.
I think the best way to look at this is to try to find a traffic data specification that is the best for us, and supporting it as the only option in the program. To support other formats it will be easier to convert it on a server first. So the question becomes, "What format is best? It doesn't have to be either of the BBC or French feeds - maybe another country uses the format that is the best for us.

Kizza,

Thanks for your comments.

From what I could see, the BBC feed looked like it used an existing 'standard', but I know little about such things.

I agree with Kizza. Anyone know whether an open standard exists?

Cheers,

Chris.

In my opinion, if we can keep from using a server for real time info, that will be easier. I'm not sure that we have the needed resource to maintain a server fort such purpose (depends on the user base we're going to have)

The current "french" format is an official european format that should be used by every european countries in the next years (see http://www.datex2.eu/), I think that we can use it as it will expand and be usable by lots of people.

We could have plugins for each main data formats for traffic information (at least BBC's tpegML and datex2 at the moment, and maybe geoRSS after).

From what I've read, tpegML is horrid to use

So far, we have :
- tpegML for BBC
- DatexII for France and more european countries in the futures
- geoRSS (supported by google maps and other apps) : see http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/prototypes/archives/2007/06/traffic_on_goog_1.html for a working realtime conversion of BBC's feed to geoRSS
- others ?

On a side note, I saw that there are rss feeds for highways in the UK, they could be used :
http://www.highways.gov.uk/traffic/11253.aspx

I've spoken to people who have off-the-shelf satnav systems (TomTom, etc) and they tell me that although they have live traffic info functionality, they never use it, as it doesn't seem to add anything useful to route planning. From a personal perspective, I see this functionality as a low-priority, but am happy to go with the concensus of opinion.

With regard to the plug-ins, this would be a very UNIX GNU/Linux way of doing things, as it allows for different types of data (maybe some not yet invented) to talk to OSN though future plug-ins. I suspect that if we adopt this functionality, plug-ins will be the way to go.

Chris.

Yep agree with making it 1.4.
I can see that making this kind of information useful to a routing engine would be difficult. The alert would say, "Accident on Blah St" but the router is trying to work out, "Should I take the detour that takes 15 mins longer?"

I wonder if the information is good enough for even a person to decide what to do, at least for most cases.