Standardized Data Formats: Consider converging to Linear referencing system (like Open LR) or CIFS

[sghorbanian]

A standard that enables Linear Referencing can help robots understand more about the nature of the blockage and be able to ingest it more intelligently and infer the heading of the obstruction.

We agree that there should be a single data format. We believe there are decent ones to start (LR, CIFs), and we will leave it to the data producers to decide on an MVP.

Waze has "CIFS", which is what Seattle's feed is based off of:
https://developers.google.com/waze/data-feed/road-closure-information

Linear Referencing is a general technique, for which the are competing implementations as well:

(TomTom) https://www.openlr-association.com/

and

(OSM) https://www.mapzen.com/blog/osmlr-2nd-technical-preview/

But we'd be happy to participate in discussions that decide on this standard, since we recognize each consumer's requirements may differ. Granularity of the data (e.g., lane-level vs road-level) falls into this category.

[kpwebb]

@sghorbanian thanks for flagging this and agreed on the need for some form of linear/location referencing in the WZDx spec. As an FYI, the work on OSMLR you referenced above rolled back into the SharedStreets project when Mapzen folded. The Mapzen implementation of OSMLR was only supported within the Valhalla routing engine and was later removed in 2018.

The work on the SharedStreets spec and tools continues over here:

https://github.com/sharedstreets/sharedstreets-ref-system/ and for what it's worth we're using the SharedStreets referencing system in our open source closures tool: https://medium.com/sharedstreets/introducing-sharedstreets-road-closures-67a89177e1c3

Also, if you're curious about the history of OSMLR and SharedStreets and our thinking referencing systems generally, check out the thread that kicked these projects off:

opentraffic/architecture#1

[sghorbanian]

Using geoJSON to describe the geometry of the event and the associated metadata is fine. We would prefer that to anything that is customer/source specific. Thanks!