It’s been a huge year for the Open Data & Innovation team at Transport for NSW. We’ve had over 50 data releases, 3 innovation challenges, and over 100 guests at our Open Data Day celebrations! Before we sign off for 2020, here are our highlights from the year that was.
If you’re a learner driver, you can now choose from 3 great digital log book apps that can completely replace your paper log book! These apps are officially endorsed by Transport for NSW, and come with many handy features to help you get the most out of your learning experience.
App developer Bernice (Xiaodan) Zhang entered her Chinese language app in to our Open Data Day Pitch Competition in March, and by September it was officially endorsed by Transport for NSW (TfNSW).
We’re going back to basics and covering off some open data fundamentals: the definition of open data, why it’s important, and where to go if you’d like to learn more. If you’re someone who doesn’t yet know much about ‘open data’, this blog post is for you!
Transport for NSW (TfNSW) holds several innovation challenges, which are open to the public throughout the year, in order to find innovative solutions for real world customer problems. Our innovation challenges vary from helping boaters navigate safely on our waterways, to digitising the paper based log book for learner drivers, or helping keep our clearways stay clear. Ideas and solutions come from a variety of industries and backgrounds, bringing new perspectives to the table.
In the last decade, we have seen open data policies geared at making open data transparent, accessible and available to the public. Today, we are seeing improved access to open data across the globe, giving organisations opportunities to innovate and solve problems. We can track our public transport in real time, find out which car park has available spots, and know more about our greenhouse gas emissions.
We, the Open Data and Innovation team, have hosted many innovation challenges over the last few years, and have seen some great pitches. We are often asked what makes a good pitch. After all, you have only five minutes to explain your product and convince the judges that your product or idea is the most compelling. Here are our top tips to help you deliver an effective pitch.
For the last blog post in our 3-part series on OpenStreetMap (OSM), we would like to focus on what the future of TfNSW’s Trip Planner might be if we harnessed the power of OSM. Trip Planner has already embraced several recent changes (see post Changes and New Features in the TfNSW Trip Planner, such as offering mix modes of transportation to allow more tailored results.
As outlined in our previous blog post, OpenStreetMap (OSM) is a free, editable map of the whole world that is being put together by contributors. The data from OSM is freely available for visualisation, query, download, and modification under open-content license. It provides a high level of detail and accuracy that can rival other map offerings, which at times can make it fairly complex to use.
OpenStreetMap (OSM) is a collaborative open source project that aims to create a free editable map of the world. Think of Wikipedia but in map form. OSM was created by Steve Coast in the UK in 2004 after being inspired by the success of Wikipedia and the rise of proprietary mapping data and tools across the world. Since it began, OSM has grown to over two million registered users who can collect data for the platform. This crowdsourced data is then made available under the Open Database License.