User talk:Sjbarbeau

I am in Tampa, Florida, in the United States. I am a researcher at the Center for Urban Transportation Research [1] at the University of South Florida (USF)[2], and one of the founding faculty members for the Location-Aware Information Systems Laboratory [3]. My background is in Computer Science, and my primary interest in the development of mobile phone apps, particularly on the Android platform, in the area of location-based services (LBS).

I'm collecting OSM data primarily in the USF area to provide a test bed for some of our projects and mobile apps. My edits there are as Sjbarbeau.

One of our past projects focused on examining the use of OpenStreetMap data in the OpenTripPlanner [4] open-source mulitmodal trip planning software. We created an instance of OpenTripPlanner for the Tampa Bay area to assist in our research: http://opentripplanner.usf.edu/

For this project we also created GO-Sync[5], an open-source software tool for General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS)[6] - OpenStreetMap Synchronization. This synchronization process allows an agency to upload all bus stops from their GTFS data into OpenStreetMap, as well as retrieve crowd-sourced edits such as improvements of bus stop locations or the addition of amenities such as benches, lighting, and bike racks for integration back into the transit agency's bus stop inventory. When an agency produces a new GTFS dataset with updated route and stop information, GO_Sync will automatically compare this against the contents of OSM and guide the user through merging any changes in both datasets.

More information on this research project is available at the main project website, "Enabling Cost-Effective Multimodal Trip Planners Through Open Transit Data" [7].

I've also developed a few apps outside of USF related to LBS, including the GPS Benchmark [8] software that analyzes the accuracy of positioning systems (e.g., GPS, network trilateration, etc.) in mobile devices.