About

We are Francesco, Giacomo, and Roberto, EPFL students in Computer Science and Data Science. We are all Italian, and we all love our country. This is why we would like to give our contribution to innovate.

The motivation for our project comes from the crucial lack of open data regarding public transportation in Italy: differently from what happens in other European countries, there is no public database curating these data nationally and releasing them in an aggregate form. Transportation is unfortunately not an exception, since Italy ranks 32nd in the global rankings of the Open Data Index, with major shortcomings in other key categories. A first effort in independently collecting a dataset of that kind has been carried on by TrainStats, but is very minimal, and it is not easy to navigate the website nor to quickly gain insights or general trends. In other words, these data are currently readable by engineers, who know how to approach and process them, but not by everyone else. The goal of this project is to fill this gap, by making them available to the general population in a simple and intuitive manner. On one side, this would be a service to the community, improving the information currently available and helping people in planning a more informed trip schedule. On the other, it would improve public accountability, pushing Trenitalia to improve its rail system to decrease delays and malfunctions.

Community 🤗

We believe this project can be impactful, fun, and a chance to learn new skills or meet interesting people. Our mission is to showcase how the use of open data can improve public services.

We have decided to launch an open-source community to support this project with the following two guidelines:

everybody can contribute with anything that (choose any of the following):
- excites them
- believes is useful for the mission
- believes is useful for themselves (e.g. learn web-development or data science skills)
nobody in the community should feel any pressure to do any activity

and with the following goals:

expanding the current openritardi.org with new countries
expanding the data science part of the project
find a way to make it impactful
build a community driven by the interest of open data and data science

🚀 You can join our community by signing up on our Slack!

Open source

This project is an open source effort. You are free to contribute or download the data on GitHub. We would like to warmly thank the following GitHub contributors for their amazing work: