[Transit-tools-developers] thinking about choice sets

[Chris S. <ch...@ch...>]

Fellow developers,

 

So I think the next key piece of Transit Surfer/Transit Board to work on is
the creation and management of choice sets. A choice set is currently the
driver behind Transit Boards, and it has great potential for Transit Surfer.

 

A choice set is nothing more that a list of transit lines boarding at a set
of transit stops. As currently modeled, it's an XML structure that looks
like this:

 

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<choice_set>

 

            <stylesheet size="small">

                        lloyd

            </stylesheet>

            

            <banner>

                        Lloyd District to North Portland

            </banner>

            

            <message>

                        Transit Board&amp;trade; is a trademark and service
of <a target="_blank" href="http://portlandtransport.com">Portland
Transport</a> provided in cooperation with the 

                        Lloyd TMA. We welcome your <a
href="mailto:web...@po...">feedback or suggestions</a>.

            </message>

                        

            <stop id="1097">

                        <route id="140"/>

                        <route id="4"/>

            </stop>

            <stop id="11814">

                        <route id="1"/>

            </stop>

            <stop id="10953">

                        <route id="6"/>

            </stop>

            <stop id="11508">

                        <route id="190"/>

            </stop>

            

</choice_set>

 

The stylesheet, banner and message elements are application-specific to
Transit Board. The stop/route elements are the key for the choices. In
Transit Board they essentially drive the list of lines in the table.

 

In Transit Surfer, I see the potential for a user to have a set of choice
sets that constitute 'My Favorite Transit Places'. This would be a much
better starting point for the interface than entering a stop id, or
navigating through a set of lines to a set of stops to a stop.

 

You can see this in action for yourself at a script that I build for myself
about a year ago: http://chrissmith.us/cgi-bin/transit.pl?user=chris

 

So to make this work, we need a number of pieces of functionality:

 

1)       A user needs to be able to construct a choice set and store it in a
retrievable way

2)       A user needs to be able to define a set of choice sets that
constitute their favorites

 

So the first question is what is a user? Is it someone who has logged in via
a traditional authentication scheme (probably cumbersome on a cell phone).
Is there an alternative model?

 

Do we need to have login in order to protect privacy? Should choice sets be
private or public? Would users potentially want to use another user's choice
set. Could there be a collaboration system for sharing choice sets?

 

Let the list know what you think.

 

Thanks.

 

Chris