Open transport data

Hi,

I'm an iRail.be developer. iRail.be is a Belgian mobile site which has an API attached to it. This API provides real-time data about the Belgian train schedules. The purpose of our project is to provide an international API which should allow "transport roaming". For instance if a Belgian goes to France, his public transport application should automatically switch to the SNCF (French train company) instead of SNCB (Belgian train company).

Our efforts are well-known in Belgium, since the SNCB tried to stop our actions with lawyers. As a consequence a lot of journalists were interested in our cause, and now open data is a subject in the Belgian parlement.

As we want ta achieve open data roaming, and as we're keen on open standards, we were wondering if the UK has something like a standard for open transport data. If not this should become a European discussion and maybe a consortium should be started. We want to implement a standard that works for different types of vehicles (trains, boats, metros, buses, ...), is real-time (we want to report delays, changes of platform, ...) and that works internationaly (a client in Spain should not change its code to work with Belgian transport schemes).

Any ideas?

Thanks in advance,

Pieter Colpaert

project.iRail.be