We are glad to release our first package of API. It's about train information for Taiwan High Speed Rail (THSR). You can use this API to build your own THSR Apps for scheduling your tour, find stops information. You can also get latitude and longitude data for stops, so you can play it with Google map.
The roadmap of AccessTaiwan is shown below:
First stage:
Traffic Data, including THSR, Taiwan raiway, city buses, long range bus, flight, car-rents, and local taxi stations.
Second stage:
Culture Data, including educational data from National Palace Museum and other museum, indigenous culture data, tradition events.
Third stage:
Tours Data, including hotel, scenic spots, local food, souvenir.
To get API usage manual, please register you email at www.accesstaiwan.org. You can have API usage manual without any charge in 24~48 hours. Here is an example, shows the arriving time of each stop of train 511:
Due to the server upgrading and maintaining purpose, our service have to shutdown on the weekend. The accesstaiwan.org service will go live on next Monday noon.
We are apologize for any inconvenience, and thank you for your patience.
Taiwan, also known as “Formosa”, means “Beautiful Island” in Portuguese language, lies off the southeastern coast of mainland Asia.
You can see clear differentiations between tropical, sub-tropical, and temperate climates in Taiwan. Besides, there are about 18,400 species of wildlife on the island, with more than 20% being to rare or endangered species!.
While history of Taiwan consists of European settlement, Kingdom of Tungning, Qing rule, Japanese rule, till now, mix of cultures makes Taiwan a very unique place in the world. There are thousands kinds of traditional food you have never seen or even heard of. Moreover, abounding traditional events make life in Taiwan much more interesting!
We hope these treasure in Taiwan more accessible with unified protocol. Open data is a right way to achieve it.
Open data is an idea that certain data should be freely available to everyone to use and republish as they wish, without restrictions from copyright, patents or other mechanisms of control ~ from Wikipedia.
For this purpose, a protocol that can cross programming languages and device platforms just matters. RESTful API is the perfect one.
Our project just started from Feb. 2012. The vision is to make Taiwan tourism data more transparent and accessible with open data API. This should help global developers to create various services. We wish you feel exciting as we do!
You can request a inviation of the API at accesstaiwan.org.
Please leave comments to help us making it better.
Welcome to AccessTaiwan Blog ! This is a playground for us to talk about the current updates of our service and thoughts of open data. Keep focus on our AccessTaiwan website and blog for fun !