TRAVIC: a visualization client for public transit data

Abstract

We present TRAVIC, a thin browser-based client that is able to display smooth vehicle movements on a map. The focus is on visualizing world-wide public transit vehicle movements in an interactive way. But we also investigate other use cases, for example, traffic simulation. We describe in detail which server requests are fired and how the received data is handled. We also provide a performance evaluation conducted on several browsers. We show that, in combination with an efficient back-end, TRAVIC is able to display many thousands of vehicle movements in real-time. Our prototype implementation can be accessed under http://tracker.geops.ch.