Consuming Web Data in a Guiding App for Public Bus Users

Abstract

The complexity of urban public bus networks in big cities makes their use very difficult. This paper presents Notify.me, a set of pervasive services for mobility that employs open data from the public bus network in Madrid. Our solution provides both a guiding service to assist users travelling by bus and a notifying service (visual, acoustical and sensorial) that informs them when a relevant point on their route has been reached (transfer or destination). Notify.me needs a starting point, which can be the user’s current location, a destination and the preferences regarding the best route for the user. Notify.me requests a route from the Madrid public bus company via SOAP Web services. The back-end responds with the calculated route, the user’s route, which includes the bus lines, the transfers and the pedestrian routes needed to reach the destination. Finally, an empirical evaluation of the experiences of users who employed Notify.me is presented.