A simple tool for getting to where you’re going on the ACT bus system. Without the complexity of knowing where you are or the location of existing routes, “Route me” will provide the closest bus stop for a relevant bus service based on your current location and your intended destination all via Twitter!

Twitter is an excellent mechanism to allow users to communicate quickly and easily with short messages. We’re tapping into the popularity of this social media mechanism to bring useful real location information and co-ordinate that with the ACT bus system. This is a unique and innovative way to leverage social media popularity and get usage out of government data.

Primarily focused on the delivery of content via Twitter, RouteMe also provides a web based interface to allow the viewing of maps and route information for your account.

RouteMe’s architecture is flexible and modular. This design has allowed us to design and build a REST API implementation that facilitates quick and easy access to government data. This has been designed specifically for the judging category for open data and API development. These access methods allow developers to consume the data in a much more flexible way. Providing this access will see further use of the available data and hopefully lead to more interesting implementations and content mashups to benefit the Australian and international communities.

The power of RouteMe lies in its fast response time and minimal input requirements.

RouteMe requires only that the user tweet to the @RouteMe1 twitter account, and indicate the location they wish to travel to. Our backend handles the lookup of this location to geographic coordinates, and integrates with the REST API developed for bus information to determine the best route possible.

Traditional direction tools require users to enter in their start location and final destination. This is sometimes inappropriate as the user may be a tourist or in an area of the city that they are unfamiliar with. The advent and proliferation of mobile devices such as smart phones with location detection technology allows us to greatly simplify this process for the users.

We hope you enjoy RouteMe

Code is available on Github: http://github.com/predominant/RouteMe