VTI FAQ

  1. What should I publish?

  2. When should I vote up/down a received notification?

  3. Why there are no accounts for bus routes?

  4. Can the zone accounts represent a smaller area?

  5. Why some notifications are cut off?

   

What should I publish?

     VTI expects users to publish any transportation related information. To maximize the utility of such information, the input publication on one hand should be informative and on the other hand should be succinct. Since VTI keeps track of  the spatial and temporal information automatically, most publications only need to indicate the nature, i.e. the type of the reported event. For example, typical publications can be as simple as "accident",  "severe congestion", "ramp is closed", etc.

When should I vote up/down a received notification?

     A user can vote up/down a received notification at any time. However, since the voting information can help VTIS filter out inaccurate and falsified publications and thus improve the data quality of the notification service, it'd be better for a user to vote up/down a received notification more cautiously. E.g. a mature user probably will vote up/down more frequently when s/he is in a familiar neighborhood than when in an unacquainted one.

Why there are no accounts for bus routes?

      Creating a massive number of twitter accounts is an extremely tedious and time-consuming task. (For each twitter account, a email address has to be first registered). Since there are an overwhelming number of bus routes, I have no enough resource to create an account per bus route. In future, I may create more accounts as the user needs increase.
      Note: if you know any automatic or semi-automatic ways for signing up legitimate Twitter accounts, please let me know. Then the problem can be solved once for all.

Can the zone accounts represent a smaller area?

      The answer to this question is almost the same as that to the above one. The major hindrance to do so is again the expensive overheads for creating new Twitter accounts.

Why some notifications are cut off?

     As you might know, each Tweet cannot be longer than 140 characters. Thus when a publication exceeds the threshold, it will be truncated. This situation most likely happens to the alerts posted by train route accounts.