What is it?
Instead of publishing a dump of time schedules or a fully-fledged route planner, Linked Connections puts forward a publishing mechanism that gives clients access to the data ready to be used by a route planning algorithm. It uses departure-arrival pairs from a station to another (a connection), and orders these connections by departure time. It then fragments this dataset in documents that can be published over HTTP as illustrated in the figure below. Links in the responses ensure a client can always find more information to take into account.
Not sure this will work? Well, on the map below you can find a quick demo. We embedded the Linked Connections client and this page. Want to query the web of data from your browser for route planning advice? Click 2 pins on the map!
Your next steps in the world of Linked Connections may include:
- Implement a Linked Connections server in your own route planning software: read the specification.
- Contribute to the NodeJS Linked Connections client we are writing on github.
- Install the Javascript client and query the route planning on github.
- You want support on any part of Linked Connections? Contact Pieter Colpaert.