My wife broke her wrist playing tennis this morning. Friends who drove her to the hospital called me to come to her side and to rescue her car from the parking garage. I decided to take the bus. It was my first local bus ride in years.
I went on line to check the bus schedule. The transit agency pointed me to a site called Google Transit that combined a local street map, bus routes, and a bus schedule. This was a mash-up: a consolidation of data from several sources.
Upon entering my home address and the name of the hospital, I received a personalized itinerary that suggested what bus to catch and when, where to transfer to another bus and how long the wait would be, a map of the route, and instructions for the 3-minute walk to the hospital emergency room.
Until recently, it would not have been possible to pull this information together on the fly. Now even non-programmers can assemble a mash-up because APIs, or Application Program Interfaces, enable the data sets to speak a common language.
My automated bus itinerary saved me time and hassle. It saved me an unnecessary taxi ride.
Whenever I see workers trying to coordinate information from different sources, I wonder how much wasted effort a mash-up might eliminate.
2 comments ↓
I hope your wife recovers soon. It always seems like a double blow when a sporty person gets injured - not only are you in pain, and inconvenienced, you lose all the exercise and cameraderie that goes together with your sport!
On the point of your mash-up experience: I noticed a huge difference recently, when we moved from one town to another. The old town’s bus timetable information was something like the one you have experienced. The new one is static and doesn’t mash any of the readily available info. When I contacted them to suggest it, I might as well have been speaking Martian! I’m sure there must be someone there who can follow up on my suggestion, but the people I spoke to had so little grasp of what I was suggesting that they couldn’t even think of who to refer me to!
The site Nextbus.com is excellent for this too. Gives you a countdown of when the next bus will arrive in real time. It ties in via GPS to all the busses/trains etc. .
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