smurfy
[resource request] Czech public transport
Hello, here is a short history of data availability in Czech Republic (you can skip it)...
There used to be single company collecting and maintaining timetable and connection data in Czech Republic called Chaps (chosen a long time ago by our stupid government). Since that there were long legal fights between this company and many others, because Chaps was supposed to provide these data further. They refused to do that and instead they helped Mafra company to get rich, because they together had a monopoly for all the data collected from our country. Fortunately they lost the battle and now the data are "available", but to complicate things further Chaps exported most of them to PDF files and published only these (so much for effectivity of our courts). As far as I know, only one company (Seznam.cz) managed to extract data from it yet.
And here comes the current situation...
Official Chaps/Mafra based resources
Here is some dispatcher to get to all Chaps/Mafra based usages: http://www.chaps.cz/eng/products/IDOS-smart These resources are owned by Mafra and are built on top of Chaps data, so it should be the most accurate source of information. There are several applications for various platforms, but unfortunately I guess there is no public API directly available.
Jizdnirady.cz
Link: http://jizdnirady.cz/ There is desktop and mobile version of pages, both in Czech, English and German. You can select certain subset to search in (for example just trains, just planes, single city, etc.).
Jízdní řády IDOS
Link: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=cz.mafra.jizdnirady This is Android application officially developed by Mafra, so it has to use some internal API (probably just WireShark can sniff the addresses, parameters, etc.)
CG Transit offline jízdní řády
Link: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.circlegate.tt.transit.android Another Android application, but this one should have offline data from Chaps. Unfortunately just trial version is for free.
Seznam based resources
Seznam has extracted data from published Chaps PDF files. I am not sure how well did they managed the extraction process, but It looks pretty well from what I could see.
Mapy.cz
Link: http://mapy.cz/zakladni?planovani-trasy&x=15.6252330&y=49.8022514&z=8&rp=%7B%22criterion%22%3A%22pubt%22%2C%22departure%22%3Atrue%2C%22time%22%3A%22%22%2C%22date%22%3A%22%22%7D These pages are mainly supposed to provide maps, but it also has trip planning function. They should have all public transport stations from the whole country. Unfortunately I was unable to switch the site to another languages, so it wouldn't be easy for foreigners to find there something.
Pubtran
Link: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=cz.fhejl.pubtran Recently Seznam bought this application which was unofficial, but somehow managed to work with Chaps data. I do not know the current state - maybe they switched to Seznam data source or maybe not. But the application was top rated in the past, so it might have its good properties.
Conclusion
That's all information I collected so far. There are still active Symbian users in Czech Republic (and at least one developer ;)), so it would be amazing to have working public transport application (actually Nokia Public Transport never worked outside our capital and even there was just tube/metro information available). If you decide to incorporate Czech public transport I would be glad, so if you have any question, just ask me. And of course you can count on me with translation of application to Czech.
