Title
Geospatially Partitioning Public Transit Networks for Open Data Publishing
Abstract
Public transit operators often publish their open data in a data dump, but developers with limited computational resources may not have the means to process all this data efficiently. In our prior work we have shown that geospatially partitioning an operator's network can improve query times for client-side route planning applications by a factor of 2.4. However, it remains unclear whether this works for all network types, or other kinds of applications. To answer these questions, we must evaluate the same method on more networks and analyze the effect of geospatial partitioning on each network separately. In this paper we process three networks in Belgium: (i) the national railways, (ii) the regional operator in Flanders, and (iii) the network of the city of Brussels, using both real and artificially generated query sets. Our findings show that on the regional network, we can make query processing 4 times more efficient, but we could not improve the performance over the city network by more than 12%. Both the network's topography, and to a lesser extent how users interact with the network, determine how suitable the network is for partitioning. Thus, we come to a negative answer to our question: our method does not work equally well for all networks. Moreover, since the network's topography is the main determining factor, we expect this finding to apply to other graph-based geospatial data, as well as other Link Traversal-based applications.
Year
DOI
Venue
2021
10.13052/jwe1540-9589.2045
JOURNAL OF WEB ENGINEERING
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Linked data, open data, mobility, maintainability, web API engineering
Journal
20
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
4
1540-9589
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
0
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Harm Delva103.38
Julián Andrés Rojas201.35
Pieter Colpaert323229.18
Ruben Verborgh4630105.49