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I initially had high hopes of this - but I am finding it to be useless. Take tonight when I am planning a journey from South London to Kensington. I know Battersea Bridge is closed as it has been seriously damaged by a boat colliding with it. It is all over the news - closed for 24 hours, an likely to be closed for months - but apparently mu PPC using the POI generated by this program is unaware. The BBC site tells me in the detailed list of traffic info that it is closed. However ,this software tells me that the bridge is open, there is no icon anywhere near it, and Battersea Bridge is not mentioned. After a lot of investigation I discover that the closed road accoring to the POI generated by this program is Beaufort Road (wherever that is) - and the location of the closed road is shown as some distance from the bridge. Now that may be what the raw BBC data says, and I understand it may not be the programs fault, but it is not what the data on their website says. If the POI can't be as good as the website I am forced to dump the software an stick to what I used to do, and check the details on the website before I set out.
BTW for the record, the POI file says Beaufort Road is closed - the website says " A3220 [Battersea Bridge] Battersea both ways between A3212, Chelsea Embankment, Battersea and Prince Of Wales Drive" I know which info makes more sense to me, a regular traveler in the area.
julianbarker - The POI produced are affected by a couple of factors, which are out of my control.
The first , and most troublesome one, is that TTN5 'moves' POI's that aren't exactly on a road to the nearest road. You can see this behaviour if you try to set a favourite on an area that is not on a road, like the middle of a field. TTN5 will throw an error stating there is no suitable location, or similar.
The second issue is that the latitude/longitude data produced in an OV2 file have to be manipulated to allow entry. WGS84 values have to be turned into an interger value by multiplying by 100000, which makes the data slightly less reliable that originally intended - if you have a value of 0.000018, then you are forced to lose the 18.
Although this is not generally an issue, combined with the first problem you do *sometimes* see spurious results.
Finally, as you state the quality of the original data is paramount. What is seen on the BBC data (and most other traffic data) is that you get a value for the start and end of an incident, and not a value on the actual accident or cause. This can mean affected roads crossing the area are not identified. To ensure knowledge of these you need to browse the map and look for POI's near your route, rather than just thouse directly affecting.
The only way to improve this is to gather reliable data from additional sources. If anyone can provide me with further useable feeds I'd be happy to try and incorporate these.
Joined: 22/11/2002 13:33:48 Posts: 992 Location: Surrey, UK
Posted: Thu Sep 22, 2005 10:37 am Post subject:
rsutcliffe wrote:
julianbarker - The POI produced are affected by a couple of factors, which are out of my control.
The first , and most troublesome one, is that TTN5 'moves' POI's that aren't exactly on a road to the nearest road. You can see this behaviour if you try to set a favourite on an area that is not on a road, like the middle of a field. TTN5 will throw an error stating there is no suitable location, or similar..
TTN5 does not move a POI to the nearest road and it will set a favourite in a field (or a park in the test that I have just carried out). The coordinates of the favourite are those of the point that you select but the name assigned to it is that of the nearest road.
rsutcliffe wrote:
The second issue is that the latitude/longitude data produced in an OV2 file have to be manipulated to allow entry. WGS84 values have to be turned into an interger value by multiplying by 100000, which makes the data slightly less reliable that originally intended - if you have a value of 0.000018, then you are forced to lose the 18.
In your example you will only lose the 8 not the 18 and when converted to a distance the difference between 0.000018 and 0.00001 is insignificant.
I would have thought that the difficulties experienced by julianbarker were due to deficiences in the data supplied by the BBC and not due to any processing that you do on it.
Richard _________________ Various TomToms, Garmin eTrex Legend, GPSMAP 60CSx, Oregon 550t, Forerunner 405
My issue with TTN5 was down to an experience trying to add a favourite a couple of months back, that didn't seem to stay where I'd assigned it. Retesting provides exactly the results you mentioned.
As for the BBC data - the only other 'processing' I do is to truncate the text, as TTN5 only displays the first 64 characters. Though I'm looking at ways to improve this by substituting common abbreviations (i.e. Road to Rd), the data is almost verbatim.
I do want people to find this software useful, so am happy to incorporate any improvements people require.
I also looked at the highways agency who have a neat website that shows realtime traffic on a map. I then enquired if this was avilable via XML/RSS.
http://www.highways.gov.uk/trafficinfo/
Apparently it is in an experimental form using the OTAP specification. Which i guess is a similar idea to TPEG?
Coincidentally, I noticed an error log file appeared for the Hertfordshire feed on the 19th, due to the BBC feed being corrupted (XML header tag was missing it's tagend).
This would also attribute to 'missing' data. In the next version I will implement a retry function if the feed fails to try and avoid this in future.
Posted: Sat Sep 24, 2005 2:35 pm Post subject: County download
Hi Richard,
Well done for your offline traffic POI software, really clever and useful.
There's a couple of points I need you to clarify: the download version of Offline traffic on this web site is 0.3 but your web site's 0.6?
Secondly, when I retrieve the feeds, it doesn't show all of the UK traffic reports, eg, A38 Devon between Buckfastleigh and Ashburton only comes up if I download the Devon county report from your web site but not when I use the offline traffic software.
Is there any way the Offline Traffic software can download the whole of the UK?
Joined: May 01, 2005 Posts: 101 Location: Lancashire
Posted: Mon Jan 09, 2006 1:42 am Post subject:
Richard - I wonder if you can point me in the direction of the OV2 file format, I am unable to find this info for a POI prog that some one may right for PC's... it would be a big help so I can pass it on as I my self am not a programmer.
Cheers
T
BTW - If not don't worry - hope you dont mind me asking as all I keep finding is what the OV2 file type stands for _________________ http://www.letscommunicate.co.uk/carpc/
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