VTI (Volunteered Traveler Information) System

From users' perspective, VTI is a twitter application that dedicates to real-time transportation information. The application is crowd-sourcing based. Therefore the more people use it, the more useful it becomes. Tell friends if you think it is interesting.
Essentially, users can publish transportation information to Twitter and also subscribe such information from Twitter via VTI. A user can publish transportation information by (i). inputting a new message (equivalent to "tweet" function on Twitter) (ii). editing received notifications (equivalent to "retweet" function on Twitter).
A user can subscribe transportation information by (i). directly following specified Twitter accounts that governed by VTI (each such an account corresponds to an geographical area such that all transportation information within the area that are posted to Twitter via VTI is reposted by the account. "accounts.xml" describes all existing VTI Twitter accounts.) (ii). defining and subscribing a customized route, meaning following all VTI Twitter accounts that are crossed by the defined route.
You can install VTI via Android Market. Simply click the button below.
Available in Android Market
--- Explicit follow/unfollow specified (typed or selected) VTI Twitter accounts
--- Subscribe to a self-defined route
--- Publish information by directly inputting or editing received notifications
--- Customize notification update frequency
--- Enable/Disable voice notification
--- Increase # of your followers on Twitter by becoming a Top Publisher
Illustrated user manual provides detail instructions illustrated by captured screenshots on how to use VTI Android application.
Here is a frequently asked questions. I will try to keep it up-to-date.
  
In case you are interested in the implementation of VTI, here are some useful piece of information. dom4j and jsoup are good java libraries to handle (write, modify, parse, etc.) xml files. Twitter4j is the most powerful Java library that implements Twitter API by far. For Google Maps API, I found this article is quite informative. For any problem relevant to Android development, you should always first check it out on the official Android dev site and then maybe search similar questions on stackoverflow. By these two steps, I can resolve almost all problems I've encountered during the development work.
Currently, there are several major tasks in future development work. One task is to maintain and improve the android version regularly. Another is to transplant the application to iOS platform. The third one is to extend VTI to make it cover other cities. This expansion simply requires introducing new VTI accounts on Twitter for the intended area. However, as I state in FAQ, creating a series of Twitter accounts is not an easy task as it sounds.
I am keenly open to discussions about potential collaborations on either task or any other relevant developments of VTI. Feel free to contact me at sma21@uic.edu.