Public Transit Route Planning through Lightweight Linked Data Interfaces

While some public transit data publishers only provide a data dump, which only few reusers can afford to integrate within their applications, others provide a use case limiting origin-destination route planning API. The Linked Connections framework instead introduces a hypermedia API, over which the extendable base route planning algorithm "Connections Scan Algorithm" can be implemented. We compare the CPU usage and query execution time of a traditional server-side route planner with the CPU time and query execution time of a Linked Connections interface by evaluating query mixes with increasing load. We found that, at the expense of a higher bandwidth consumption, more queries can be answered using the same hardware with the Linked Connections server interface than with an origin-destination API, thanks to an average cache hit rate of 78%. The findings from this research show a cost-efficient way of publishing transport data that can bring federated public transit route planning at the fingertips of anyone.