[aprssig] Re: Traffic info in APRS

[Chris Kantarjiev]

So, I do this stuff (try to parse traffic info) for a living (well,
I'm trying to make a living at it). It's a very inexact science.
Road speeds on interstates are easy, where fixed sensors are in place.
The DOTs are happy to publicize construction and closures but they're
uninterested in anything resembling a standard or making it machine
readable. Highway patrols put incident reports on the web but not
in any structured fashion.

The data is out there. The commercial map vendors (navteq and teleatlas
are the two big players) have all the milemarker info (but not Thomas
Guide grids, which is unfortunately what CHP uses for their incidents).
It's a bunch of work to find the data, parse it, figure out what the
oddities are, and relate it to something that's usable by a computer.

It's also difficult to characterize what an "abnormal" incident is
(in response to someone in this thread - is that an accident where
accidents don't usually happen?)

I'm willing to spend some effort trying to expose some of this
data to APRS. I have to track down a little bit of licensing 
legalese. I also need someone to point me at a description of how
to inject appropriate objects into APRS-IS...

73 de chris KG6VYD