I was in Dublin last week, where I am an advisor to the Science Foundation Ireland – got to catch up with Mark Keane, former Open University superstar who is now Director of the SFIs ICT programme (they fund DERI Galway, among many other interesting groups and projects); hadn’t seen Mark in many many years, and I was delighted to see he’s doing great things in helping to create a lightweight (administratively) but high-expectation (intellectually) funding environment for ICT and BioTech research in Ireland; wow, they are growing at a phenomenal pace… very exciting!
When I arrived at the airport, I decided to take the recommended aiport coach service into the city centre. At that point, I knew I was in Dublin: the bus stop was internet-enabled, with real-time bus info and animations rendered onto a browser display inside the tiny little bus shelter.
I was already a big fan of a fantastic Googlemaps mashup called Dartmaps:
I’m showing the real-time locations of all running DARTs (suburban train service) in the city of Dublin, Ireland. [How?] I’m taking the realtime (not timetables) suburban rail info from IrishRail.ie, scraping it into a useful data structure, then writing it to XML. I then plot this onto Google Maps, with the help of the routes and stations data file.
To see the comparable info apparently in most little bus shelters was a sight to behold!
Inside the bus shelter… see above for close-up of display
Outside the bus shelter
Oh, and when I got on board, Bob Geldof was on the radio, in his Boomtown Rats incarnation, singing ‘I don’t like Mondays’… Only in Dublin… wonderful!
Technorati Tags: dublin, sfi, deri, dart, googlemaps, mashup
