An Innovator’s Mind – Oswald Smith
Transit Smith advised the government-owned bus service of the kind of data he would need and the format he needed it in. JUTC surprised him again when it made the data available without delay. The young innovator was then left to figure out how to integrate JUTC’s data into Google Transit. Google Transit required that transit data be in a format called the General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS)—a common format for public transport schedules and associated geographic information. “My challenge now was to transform the data JUTC gave me into GTFS.” After spending a few hours attempting to manually transform the data, Smith determined that it would take him months of full-time work to get it all done. “That’s when I realised I’m a computer science student and the computer should be doing this for me. So I spent a weekend and created a system that would convert all the data to GTFS in 20 seconds .” 40 – THE PELICAN/ISSUE 14