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UK's National Rail Shuts Down Free Timetable App
JHaselden points to this "sad tale of one developer's trying time with the National Rail, the owners of the UK's train timetable data, which flies in the face of the recent assertion of Chris Scoggins (Chief Executive, National Rail Enquiries) in Wired recently stating that they had 'opened up' their data, 'often free of charge.'" This is a good case for keeping your old emails handy; the app's author uses cut-and-paste to excellent effect in his correspondence with the rail system.
Been there many years ago with television listings presented on a mobile phone. In my case, some of the TV channels felt the listings were copyrighted to them (despite actually encouraging people to watch them!) so I had to pull the service.
In the end, I rewrote the code to screen-scrape the websites in question and released the code as a download. I was no longer running a publically available service and those people who wanted to use it had to download and set up the code themselves - which was nicely covered under the T&C's which stated "personal, non profit use only".
You do get a problem where if they change the layout then you have to re-code but big companies tend to do this very infrequently. For me it was more about the desire to keep the itch that I wanted scratched up and running than anything else.
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
Dear Riders,
Recently we've become aware of a non-commercial use of our timetables. It is our position that commercial use of these timetables is strictly prohibited and it is highly likely that any license - even those we did not require in the past - will include a charge.
Based on the facts clearly outlined above, and not our website which used to say something different, we do hereby eliminate your only way of getting live timetable and on-time updates. No, we do not provide this service for you - some poor sap does for free - and will not be doing so in the future.
Enjoy your ride,
Maj. AssHat
NR/ATOC
What are they worried about? The risk that this might lead to customers sucessfully using their service?
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of llamas.
And you are a silly person. Now go away or I shall taunt you a second time, you silly English Knnnniget!
Whenever in an argument, remember this.
I hope you were joking, because criticizing another's grammar while having 2 misspellings (one of them in the subject line!) is ironic at best and pathetic at worst.
Whenever in an argument, remember this.
Given that this decision was by National Rail, I'm amazed that they came to a decision at all. I applied for a job once - got a description from the job center and wrote off to apply.
Three months later, I got a reply. Fully expecting, "Sorry but the competition was too intense, etc" I instead got the application form. I replied with it within 24 hours. Over 1 year later, I finally got a rejection letter.
bang goes my karma... again...
I wrote the CPAN module for this API, and have had a similar cool response from NRE to my request for an API token.
ATOC were investigated by the Office for Rail Regulation for possible breach of the Competition Act over this data (the full report is long, but interesting in its own way):
http://www.rail-reg.gov.uk/server/show/nav.2433
"Critical to this conclusion was that we found no evidence that ATOC’s conduct in granting access to Darwin had prevented a new product from coming to market or hampered the emergence of new technology."
I believe the ORR plans to revisit this decision at some point, to examine whether this is still true. So... if the efforts by local and central government to "persuade" ATOC to open this data do not produce results, one approach is to build as many cool, innovative apps on top of this API as possible while it still works. Then ask for licenses for them. If ATOC do not grant those licenses, the rejection notices can be handed to the regulator to show what effect this is having on development in this area.
Bizarrely, you would think it would be in the interests of the Train Operating Companies for the public to have convenient access to this data - but the association that represents them seems more interested in making a quick buck on licensing Android and iPhone apps.
This may be a basic question, but is it even legal or enforcable for me to assert that my previous emails to you are confidential and undisclosable, despite the fact that you've read them already and never agreed to any terms or conditions while doing so?
Seriously, the fucking cheek of these bastards. That can't be right. NDAs and confidentiality agreements are, to my mind, an OPT IN process. You can't be forced to abide by terms you never agreed to, surely! Apart from a court gagging order (which sounds more fun that it is, I'm sure).
-- For those who can't reach the story, I'm talking about the CEO's insistence that the chap in question isn't allowed to publish excerpts from his previous email correspondance with the guy in charge of the timetable data. Despite the fact that the disclaimer says *specifically* that only the intended recipient can read or *disclose* the email contents, which again is another "WE'VE ALWAYS BEEN AT WAR WITH EURASIA" move from these fuckbags.
Today's weirdness is tomorrow's reason why. -- Hunter S. Thompson
What are you talking about, I just bought stock in Micropsoft yesterday. Their CEO Steve Booper throws choirs while screaming "De-volvers, De-evolvers, De-volvers"(which apparently OS X doesn't think is a word)
Monstar L
TFA appears a bit sluggish (possible Slashdot effect?) so here's the text...
National Rail Have Killed My UK Train Times App
Posted on October 29, 2010 by alexmock
About a year ago I wrote a simple web application to present UK train times in a simple format for mobile phone users.
It’s best described by the instructions. The app was deliberately spartan, really just a list of upcoming trains between a collection of stations you specified in the URL. Data came from a free API which National Rail (a body representing the UK’s train companies) has run for years. Output was presented in the cleanest way possible – people on the move don’t want to be encumbered with advertising or excessive page furniture!
One neat feature was multiple start/end points. Say you live halfway between two stations (I do) and don’t care which station you travel from. The app would look up departures from both, combine and reorder them then produce a unified table of all services you could catch. When I wrote the app none of the official train timetable sites could do this and I don’t believe any can now.
Useful, huh? And all for free. I only wrote it to scratch an itch, so that rather than wading through the cluttered National Rail site I could click a bookmark on my phone and immediately know when the next train into town was. To reiterate – I built this because it was convenient and would be useful to others. Not to make a profit.
and today National Rail killed it.
So who runs this SOAP service?
The API is supplied within a website operated by National Rail – a brand of ATOC, the grandly titled “Association of Train Operating Companies”. Their name is confusingly similar to “Network Rail”, a publicly owned organisation which owns and maintains all the infrastructure. Network Rail own the track, members of National Rail / ATOC run trains on it for a profit. Confused? Good, you’re probably supposed to be.
The Live Departure Board API has existed for a few years and I’m not the only person using it. Some kind soul even wrote a CPAN module. The API is well-documented, publicly accessible and presented as something freely usable by the public. A lot of people were doing neat things with it.
It was even listed on the London Datastore site – a state-run list of open data feeds which developers are encouraged to use to provide data to web users in new and innovative ways. There was a lot of buzz around open data like this around the time of the last election.
Edit: the page on London Datastore has now been locked. “Access Denied”. Possibly because a lot of discussion appeared on there which was critical of ATOC’s decision to extract money from users of the service. Here’s the page from before ATOC’s bombshell in Google’s cache and in case that evaporates too here’s a pdf.
After writing the web app last year I had the idea of doing an Android widget to show departure times from the user’s nearest station. It would locate a user from the phone’s GPS, look up their nearest rail station then query the LDB web service to get a list of the next handful of trains they might catch. It even got as far as a Spec for Train Time Autofinder2 – complete with mockups of the widget and definitions of its functionality. Since I’m no Android programmer it’d necessitate paying a developer and I hoped to recoup that cost by selling the app for a nominal fee. I wrote to ATOC asking whether this would be okay. A month later when they hadn’t replied I wrote again, this time by registered post. Their eventual response:
“I can confirm the National Rail Enquiries Website is for personal and non-commercial use only. Therefore, the suggestion made in your letter, to utilise the data to build an Android application is expressly prohibited. I’m sorry that we cannot be of any further assistance
There is already a section on Public Sector Information Unlocking Service by British Government.
http://www.opsi.gov.uk/unlocking-service/CommentView/guid/9abb80cc-d21a-497b-bbce-bed10e5fc5fb
Aynone interested, should go and vote so that the issue gains visibility.
According to a comment at the site above, the data will be public next time contracts are agreed. (might be some time before current ones run out)
Here is the Quote:
"Prime Minister's Building Britain's Digital Future Speech 22nd March-
Public transport timetables and real-time running information is currently owned by the operating companies. But we will work to free it up - and from today we will make it a condition of future franchises that this data will be made freely available."
Syd
In the end, this all comes down to web services being a stupid idea.
Whatchoo smokin', Willis? Web services absolutely kick serious butt.
Whether using them as a means of enforcing a hard three-tier architecture through a DMZ (do all the "hard" stuff in the web service, and rewriting either your data access or presentation layers becomes trivial, not to mention the security implications), or just as a way of exporting some level of programmatically-accessible (possibly) public functionality (such as the Google or Bing Maps API), I've liked just about everything I've seen so far about web services - With the exception of importing the wsdl of a service you don't control, which IMO counts as the weakest link in the whole concept.
They're implemented not to provide useful data to customers or to the public in general, but rather to be just one more "accomplishment" that said manager or executive can list on his CV.
You could make that same claim about any tool - If you use them just for the sake of using them, you probably won't like the end result.
Put bluntly, if you consider web services a stupid idea, you haven't used them properly.
No. National Rail is a trademark of ATOC. They are already a private company - otherwise the data could be liberated with repeated FOA requests.
I suspect some bean counter realized that as 3rd-party sites like these proliferate, traffic will be driven away from the "official" National Rail site. As a result, the railways will have fewer eyeballs to which to present packages, specials and other similar up-sells which are key to their revenue stream. I realize /. is dramatically anti-ad, but you need to realize the click-through on deals like these from Joe Average is likely fairly good.... So National Rail doesn't want to lose those eyeballs, even if it's to a site that's 100% non-commercial. The stupid part is nobody thought of this before creating the webservice.
I also see no need for these so-called 'web-services'. The entire timetable is already available in a handy 2048 page paperback format that easily fits into a medium-sized rucksack, is perfectly readable by most travellers under 30, and costs only 16 GBP! Buy it today and you'll get a whole month's use from it before it's out of date:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/GB-rail-timetable-summer-10/dp/0117063665
Bargain!
Those pedantic about either spelling or grammer are ultimatly the sad pathetic people who sit alone out in the kitchen at parties picking at their nails trying to not make eye contact with anyone.
Conversely, they may be people who care passionately about using language The Right Way -- much as Star Wars nerds will correct you if you assert that Han was Leia's sister, or that Luke build R2-D2. Pursuit of perfection is something which all nerds do to a certain extent, especially programmers. If I tell you, "your code example is missing braces on your 'if' clause, so it won't evaluate the way you want it to", I'm not trying to be an asshole. Think of it as a verbal compiler error. Ironically, many programmers take the perspective that writing in English is something in which correctness and conformity to convention doesn't matter -- and yet we must be extremely correct when coding.
Think back to school? did anyone like that kid who used to correct the other kids grammer? no. no they did not.
What can I say - no one likes being exposed as wrong.
There is no standards body for the english language, if someone says something and you understand it and the meaning you get is close enough to what they intended then it's perfectly good.
Natural language is too ambiguous to parse. You cannot always guarantee that someone will understand what you mean, and errors in word choice, punctuation, or spelling only compound that. People who care about communication take the time to be courteous to their listener/reader, and write/speak in a way which they know the audience will not mistake. If you can't be bothered to follow the conventions which guide English language (even if they aren't codified the way French is), you're either a visionary literary mind (e.g., e e cummings) or you need an editor.
The OED is considered by many to be a definitive reference for spellings and word meanings. I'm not sure where one would find a grammar reference - googling for one was not immediately useful. Still, not poor spelling is, in the age of the internet, a sign that one doesn't care about spelling it right, rather than not knowing the spelling. Unless you've mangled the word (and even then), Googling for it will give great answers. Sometimes Google corrects it, and other times the first page of results gives the answers many times over. ("orderves" -> "how do you spell orderves" -> "hors d'oeuvre") In short, spelling errors are a sign of either unnoticed typogaphical mistakes or of laziness, and when they're systematic people will tend to assume the latter.
I know that spelling!=grammar, but still, you would expect someone who is pedantic about a person's grammar to at least go over his post and make sure there are no spelling mistakes.
Whenever in an argument, remember this.