The main goal of the Transport for NSW Open Data Team is to provide as much open data as possible to allow you to develop awesome apps like the ones featured on https://transportnsw.info/apps. Our innovative open data hub makes it easy for you to access and explore our data and start using it in no time at all. Registering an account and acquiring an API key is a simple process that anyone can do. Learning how the data is structured and how to use it might take a bit longer but we provide all the documents and tools that hopefully make it easy for you. This blog post outlines these processes at a high level and provides some tips and tricks to get you started.
Where to find data?
All of Transport for NSW’s open data can be found and accessed on the open data hub’s data catalogue (https://opendata.transport.nsw.gov.au/search/type/dataset). The data catalogue contains a list of datasets, or groups of data, that contain resources (data files). You can browse the data catalogue without logging in but you will need to register an account if you wish to download or view the resources. Resources or data files can vary in format, including zip, pdf, csv, xls, geoJSON and others. Some of the major datasets, including the GTFS bundle, real-time feeds and trip planner, can also be accessed via an API.
Data can also be found on other government data portals, the main one being data.nsw.gov.au. There are also other websites where you can find more data such as the Transit Feeds website or the Stackexchange Open Data Community. These sites and other resources can be found on our Useful Links page on the open data hub. Our open data forum is another great place to find more data that other users have requested or share data with our open data community.
How to access our data?
You can browse our data catalogue without logging in but you will need to register an account if you want to view, download and use our data. Having an account will allow you to acquire an API key so that you can connect to our datasets and develop applications. To register for a new account go to https://opendata.transport.nsw.gov.au/user/register, fill out and submit the form. You will then receive a confirmation email with a link to set up your password. Once logged in you can create a new application on our portal and start using our data. You can find a more detailed step by step guide of this process on our User Guide page.
How to use our data?
The way you use our data is entirely up to you! That is the main philosophy behind open data. The Open Data Team at Transport for NSW focuses on finding data and publishing it on our portal for you to use. What you do with it is up to you. It’s also important to note that we provide very little coding support since we only focus on the data itself. If you need assistance with coding and development our open data forum is a great place to connect with other developers in our community and ask questions, share ideas and learn from what others have done. Our documentation page is also extremely useful when getting started. The technical documents outline how the GTFS and GTFS-R data is structured, what each of the API contains and any amendments made by TfNSW.
Data on the open data hub will either be a static file or an API. Static files will be in a variety of formats including csv, xls, pdf, zip, geoJSON, docx and others. These types of files are static and can be downloaded like any regular file from our data catalogue. To use our APIs you will need to set up an application on our portal and get an API key. You can use the API explorer to use and browse the API online. The API explorer will also give you code samples to connect to the API programmatically so you can use the data in your apps. All of the Transport for NSW open data that is available will be published on our website. If there’s something you’re looking for that is not available you will need to derive it from a combination of datasets or request it to us so we see if it exists.
How to request new data?
The Open Data Team’s main goal is to get as much open data published as possible. Of course there are times where you might need some more specific datasets or have thought of some data that might exist but we don’t have on our website. We welcome requests for new data so that we can hunt it down for you. The best way to request for data is to post on the open data forum using the ‘Request for data’ category. You can also email us at opendataprogram@transport.nsw.gov.au but we encourage you to post on the forum so that other developers in our community are aware of the request and can be kept up to date with our progress. If the data exists we’ll do everything we can to find it and publish it for you.
Hope this post helps you get started and develop some wonderful apps!
- Alex Felman from the TfNSW Open Data Team