From 651b82246a9589856a57c716cbd70ace19eb8144 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Waldo Jaquith Date: Fri, 29 Jul 2016 13:44:18 -0400 Subject: [PATCH] Link to GTFS overview --- _posts/2016-07-29-schemas.md | 2 +- 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-) diff --git a/_posts/2016-07-29-schemas.md b/_posts/2016-07-29-schemas.md index 0911412..5037dd1 100644 --- a/_posts/2016-07-29-schemas.md +++ b/_posts/2016-07-29-schemas.md @@ -52,7 +52,7 @@ Creating a standard is hard. The right way to create a standard involves engagin This approach has yielded exactly zero standards in this space. -General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS) is the huge success story here, and that resulted from [some Google engineers working with a single transit agency](http://www.transitwiki.org/TransitWiki/index.php?title=General_Transit_Feed_Specification#Origins_.26_history). There was no series of roundtables, no acceptance testing, no RFC. They just did it, building something lightweight and extensible that solved the problems at hand. It’s changed a lot in the 11 years since, adapting to the needs of its growing user base and becoming subject to the normal standards-creation processes, but for almost that entire time, GTFS has been _the_ standard for transit data. +[General Transit Feed Specification](https://developers.google.com/transit/gtfs/) (GTFS) is the huge success story here, and that resulted from [some Google engineers working with a single transit agency](http://www.transitwiki.org/TransitWiki/index.php?title=General_Transit_Feed_Specification#Origins_.26_history). There was no series of roundtables, no acceptance testing, no RFC. They just did it, building something lightweight and extensible that solved the problems at hand. It’s changed a lot in the 11 years since, adapting to the needs of its growing user base and becoming subject to the normal standards-creation processes, but for almost that entire time, GTFS has been _the_ standard for transit data. We don’t have enough data points to know whether GTFS is an outlier or a model, but I posit that it’s a model. (Consider that [Open311 emerged in the same way](http://www.open311.org/2010/02/san-francisco-and-dc-set-to-launch-open311-apis/).) There’s no movement to create schemas for the many dozens of core datasets that are being published by governments (or, rather, not being published). The effort required to convene a standards group is apparently not worth the trouble, what with it not happening. The effort required to do this for all of these core datasets is implausibly large. So let’s not.