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.
--- 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.