A Mobile Travel Companion Based on Open Accessibility Data

Nowadays, both the quantity and quality of online information about accessibility are improving thanks to the development of Open Data and the use of crowdsourcing. However citizens with reduced mobility still often have to combine multiple sources of information to prepare their trips and can thus hardly do it on the move. The purpose of this paper is to address this problem by proposing a mobile travel companion. On the backend side, a number of available Open Data about public transportation (bus, train, parking) as well as accessibility of public infrastructures are consolidated both from experts and a crowdsourcing initiative. On the user interface side, it demonstrates how to design an end-to-end view on the accessibility information covering both the travel and the visited infrastructures. The interface organisation is compatible with mobile terminals and makes intelligent use of geolocalisation and proximity information. The whole concept is validated on a complete set of data from a major Belgian city.