Date: Sat, 21 Apr 2001 20:26:02 -0700
From: Arun Sharma <arun@sharmas.dhs.org>
Subject: City bus schedules
To: Linux India Programmers <linux-india-programmers@lists.sourceforge.net>

All,

I've been thinking of creating an open source project that'll help
users in Indian cities to look up the local bus schedules and routes.

I'm not planning to address the procurement of the data (which itself
is valuable) right now.

To this end, I was looking at existing research on how to store
this voluminous data. I ran into a few research papers, that have various
theories. In fact, Ullman (yes, the author of several text books) uses
this question on his PhD qualifying exam for 15 points :)

I think the simplest thing to do is to store the data as a collection
of nodes and edge sets. However, SQL may not be good enough to answer
complex queries like, what's the best way to go from point X to point Y.

For simplicty, I'm planning to skirt the problem for now and just focus
on storing the data and displaying it in a simple manner.

I'm planning to use postgresql + jakarta-tomcat for this project. I
have the initial software setup (read: JDBC driver is working).

When I have some code to share, I'll post it here.

        -Arun

http://www.cse.iitb.ernet.in:8000/proxy/navigator/~navigator/
http://www-db.stanford.edu/~ullman/quals/gwqual97.txt