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Transportation

Overture's Transportation theme schema describes the infrastructure and conventions of how people and objects travel around the world. Transportation data includes highways, footways, cycleways, railways, ferry routes, and public transportation.

Use Cases​

Some common use cases for which data in Overture's Transportation theme schema may be used include:

  • Mapping. Rendering a map of connected roads and paths.
  • Routing. Calculating optimal routes from place to place.
  • Navigation. Generating granular instructions on the maneuvers needed to follow a route.
  • Analytics. Transportation-related analysis including traffic safety analysis and disaster planning.
  • Geocoding. Getting the coordinates of street intersections (geocodes); or the street intersection near specific coordinates (reverse geocodes).

Key Concepts​

  • Shape and Connectivity. The Transportation theme schema captures the shape and connectivity of the transportation network using Segment and Connector features. The schema design allows the segmentation process to promote shape stability and ultimately GERS ID stability.

    Read more about these concepts on the Shape and Connectivity page.

  • Scoped and Rule-Based Properties. The Transportation theme schema allows property values to be specified for granular scopes at the sub-feature level. For example:

    • A speed limit on a road segment might be scoped to apply only to part of the road geometry using Geometric Scoping.
    • The directionality of a segment, controlling the direction or directions in which traffic can flow along the segment geometry, may be specified to change at different times of day using Temporal Scoping.
    • The categories of people and vehicles who are allowed to travel on a segment can be controlled using Subjective Scoping.
    • A real-world attribute that varies under changing environmental conditions can be modeled using Environmental Scoping.

    Read more about these concepts on the Scoped and Rule-Based Properties page.

  • Roads. The Transportation theme schema models any kind of road, street, or path, including dedicated walking and cycling paths, as road segments. Roads are currently the most developed part of the Transportation schema.

    Read more about roads on the Roads page.

  • Travel Modes. The Transportation theme supports a fuzzy concept called travel mode which can be used as a way of controlling the scope of scoped and rule-based properties.

    Read more about the travel modes concept and how travel modes interact with other scoping properties on the Travel Modes page.

Schema Reference​

Status and Next Steps​

  • For the initial v0.4.0 schema release, we focused most of our efforts on defining core transportations concepts and applying these concepts to roads.
  • In future releases, we hope to work through our backlog of known issues and ideally start work on railways and waterways and, ideally, the public transportation network.
  • We would value your input on the Transportation schema! Please consider sharing feedback as indicated in the schema Introduction.