Towards a Real-Time Public Transport Data Framework using Crowd-sourced Passenger Contributed Data

Public transportation is still an important part of a modern city. The availability of real-time public transport data can help improve the needs of commuters. However, the access to the data or its availability is not always guaranteed. There are two reasons why this information is unfortunately not accessible nor available. Firstly, the public transport data is only available in closed systems. It is only accessible internally, often only used by the transport service provider. Secondly, some transport service providers do not have the infrastructure to acquire real-time data, let alone to provide the data to any interested parties. This paper discusses the problems and proposes a framework that aims to provide real-time public transport data using crowd-sourced data provided by commuters for commuters. The use of sensor data from commuters' smartphones as well as interpreted contexts may be a viable solution to the problems identified. In this paper, implementation challenges of such a framework are summarised and several potential research aspects are presented.