The govermnent's Informed Traveller Project aims at allowing any traveller to obtain relevant and up-to-date pre-trip and related journey information by various means (fax, phone, web, kiosk) from numerous database sources in distant locations. A number of counties such as Buckinghamshire and Hampshire set up local journey planners for public transport services within their own county and to adjacent counties. However, to develop a similar service with national coverage would be a mammoth task. Rather than seeking to develop a monolithic national journey planner, the Journey Web project is designed to let the local journey planners co-operate on different parts of the journey. By proposing a method of mutual interrogation between distributed journey planners, responsibility for management of local places and public transport services databases utilises local knowledge. This method keeps the search process at a manageable scale, since it is anticipated that local journey planners can satisfy at least 80% of local enquiries. The Journey Web project involves a consortium of county councils and industrial partners with funding from the DETR and the EPSRC under the LINK Inland Surface Transport programme. It is prototyping an Internet-based protocol to allow local journey planners to support traveller requests for details of public transport trips to and from adjacent and distant counties across the nation, in addition to trip details in the local county. Using a gazetteer and registry, a local journey planner determines the location of the remote journey planner associated with a particular village, makes requests for the relevant place, exchange points, and timetable information via the Journey Web protocol, and translates responses back into the style of the local journey planner. This paper explains the methodology and message structure of the Journey Web protocol.
Samenvatting