BusVis

Visualization of transit systems. As argument to one of the main applications (located in the package infovis or it can be built with maven) an alternative resource path can be used. The alternative path can either be in the internal csv format or a zip file in the GTFS (General Transit Feed Specification). A more detailed explanation of command line arguments can be obtained by passing -h or --help on the command line.

Internal CSV-Format

The internal csv format is automatically used when the path given as first argument is a directory. This directory must contain the following files:

• stops.csv

  A character (';') separated file (csv) containing all stops/stations. The first column is the name of a station and the second is the unique integer id. The next two columns are the geographic coordinates of the station. The last two columns are the coordinates in the schematic svg file abstract.svg. When a station does not occur in the schematic map, the value 'UNKNOWN' is used. Any further columns are ignored.

• abstract.svg (optional)

  An optional schematic representation of the transportation network as scalable vector graphic (svg). The positions of the stations are encoded in stops.csv

• lines.csv

  Defines the colors of the transportation lines. The first column is the unique name of the line. The next three columns are the color channels, red, green, and blue respectively. An optional fourth column has a long version of the name of the lines.

• edges.csv

  Defines all edges. The first column is the name of the line as defined in lines.csv. The second column is the tour number - subsequent tours must have distinct tour numbers. The third column is the start station id. The next two columns are the start and end time of the edge in seconds since midnight. The last column is the id of the destination station.

• walking-dists.csv (optional)

  Optionally defines distances between all stations. The distances are undirected and the distance from a station to itself is not needed. The first two columns define the pair of stations and the third is the walking time in seconds.

• settings.ini (optional)

  A settings file similar to the one used for the GTFS format below. Currently only the scale value is implemented.

The default character set for the csv files is CP1252 to be excel compliant -- use the corresponding command line argument to change the character set.

GTFS-Format

The GTFS format is used when the path points to a zip file. The default character set of the GTFS format (UTF-8) is used except when overwritten by the second command line argument. In an optional ini file, that is located in the same folder with the same name as the zip, properties regarding the way of interpreting the GTFS file can be set. Valid fields are:

• cache

  Caches the content of the GTFS file in the internal csv format to ensure better startup times. However, this will turn the today value of the date field to the actual date.

• date

  Sets the date the data should be loaded for. To always use the current date the value today can be used. Otherwise the GTFS style date format (YYYYMMDD) must be used.

• scale

  The scaling factor for geographic coordinates.

A sample GTFS data set can be found at src/main/resources/nyc/mta_20120701.zip.