ITO

The Traveline ITO service

To improve public transport data quality, Traveline contracts Ito World Ltd to provide transport authorities and operators in England, Wales and Scotland with access to the ITO service.

The ITO service is updated every 24 hours with the latest available NaPTAN and National Gazetteer data. Various tests are done on the data to produce observations and warnings, and plot the results on maps.

The warnings all regions subscribe to are:

Stop road distance - stop is too far from a road (roads as in Navteq maps)
Stops In Water
Stop Names Too Long
Stop Names With High Risk Words
Stop Indicators With High Risk Words
Locality shape - the shape formed by the boundary of the stops associated with the same locality. If this is too long and thin a warning is given.
Unused Locality Near Stops
Stops in Alternate Locality
Manual Warning

Most regions are now adding these further warnings:

stop names with repeating words
localities contained by non-parent
localities overlapped
locality with Geocode outside
wrong bearing

Users with "Reviewer" permissions, which include the transport authority concerned, can "Suppress" a warning if they consider it not to be relevant. In the first 2 years of using the service over 93,000 issues have been resolved.

The current observations not in the above list are:

Stop Names Containing Locality Name
Stop Names With Illegal Capitals
Stop Names With Illegal Characters
Stops Names With Incorrect Spaces
Stop Indicators With Illegal Capitals
Stop Indicators With Illegal Characters
Stops Area Members Without Identical Names
Stops Area Members With Different Localities
Stops In Different Authority
Stops in Parent Locality
Localities With Identical Stops
Top Level Localities With Identical Stops
Exchanges Without Localities
Localities Without Exhanges
Stop with Bearing Missing
Stop Road Unknown
Locality Not Unique

Regional managers are now able to convert Observations to Warnings so that as warnings the process of improving the data can be monitored and any false warnings suppressed.

Which Observations should be warnings?

Any for which you do not currently have any observations
Any for which you only have a few observations eg under 50
Choose observations which if corrected are likely to reduce other observations. For example some records with "Stop Names Too Long" are likely also have "Stop Names with repeating words" and may also be listed in "Stop Names Containing Locality Name".
Can any observations be corrected programatically? For example many "Stop Names with Incorrect Spaces" may be trailing spaces which software could remove. Or many "Stop Names With Illegal Characters" may be resolved by removing "/".
Which Observations will improve my journey planner most? Some observations like "Locality Contained By Non-Parent", "Localities Overlapped", "Stops in Parent Locality", "Locality with Geocode Outside", "Unused Locality Near Stops" may take longer to resolve but if attended to will bring greater consistency to data and, for instance, stop names along bus routes will appear to be more logical.

Each region has a different distribution of observation types, different means to resolve them and different benefits from doing so. Therefore it is for each region to decide their priorities for converting observations to warnings. If possible observations should be chosen for which there is a good chance that by the end of March 2009 they can be reduced to zero.

It should be remembered that the observations and warnings are automatically generated and do not necessarily determine one course of action. For example an Unused locality near stops could equally indicate that the nearby stops should be associated with that locality or that the unused locality should be marked inactive in the on line gazetteer. At all times the responses to the ITO tests should be guided by local knowledge.

How do I get started?

An existing user of the ITO NaPTAN service can invite you. Alternatively Access the ITO service now and ask for a subscription. You will be sent an email with your password.

There are two ways to get into the service:

enter a bus stop name, number, or town name in the search box
follow the geographical hierarchy to find warnings and observations for each area. You can can click on the number totals to find the details.

The ITO NaPTAN service is for viewing NaPTAN and viewing the results of tests on the NaPTAN data. There are only two actions that can be taken within ITO:

Suppress a warning, that you believe not to be valid
create a manual warning, for the stop owner to see and act on