In the screen shot below, CoStar used Bing Maps for a base map API and Mapfluence elegantly renders cartographically-pleasing transit lines, stations and detailed attributes on a map for the Washington DC area. Urban Mapping’s mass transit data is available for fixed rail (subway, commuter, light, long haul) across North America and several European countries. The difficulty in creating a visually satisfying solution that can be created algorithmically cannot be overstated–rail systems are unique and each one has its own quirks. We’ve done a great deal of tweaking to best represent rail maps in the way that locals expect them to look–an even more refined version is in the works and will be available very soon.

In addition to visually delineating transit lines/stations on a map, CoStar incorporates UMI’s mass transit data into the property search function. As the screen shot below indicates, a subscriber can create a transit-based time or distance constraint. This allows for would-be tenants to search for available property that is (say) only within a five minute walk of a commuter rail station.

In this property profile view, the individual listing is annotated with proximity to nearby public transportation and airport info. Our Mass Transit Proximity API easily allows customers to code property listings (or any location) with proximity to train stations.

Over the past months we’ve made a significant investment in the Graphserver project and we’re thrilled to announce we’ve reached a major milestone. Sure, it’s self-serving, but not in a selfish way. At UMI, we focus on our strengths–normalizing, maintaining and distributing high value data sets. We develop applications insofar as they help to deliver/serve data, but as for writing software–yuck–issues abound. But offering transit data without the ability to perform routing? That’s a bad idea! So we pursued a FOSS path. The community can do a better job with software, and now that we’ve made the engine scale, resource-efficient and oh so robust, it’s in a very good place for commercial (or other) use. And that’s exactly what we’re prepared to do (that news coming another day).

In GPS (aka, PND, PNAV, nav, turn-by-turn) land, multimodal is perceived as a holy grail–permitting a user to route in any combination of transit (bus/train) drive and walk opens up new opportunities for mobile devices–smartphones, GPS devices, ultra-portable laptops and other emerging categories. By ensuring the data is accurate, hardware manufacturers, publishers, hackers and anybody else can ‘give it a go.’ Oh, and with (sometimes) freely-available GTFS transit data, you can run your own instance of graphserver and not even be concerned if/when Google will release an API for Transit!

[Note: Of the 70 or so systems for which Google receives data from transit agencies, only 18 make it publically-available. Some parties go far out of their way to obtain this data and make it available to the public.]

- The official news