FinEstSmartMobility API

This project has ended on the 28th February 2019. The collected tracking dataset will be made available at the Helsinki Region Infoshare (https://hri.fi).

This page describes the FinEst API, which was a pilot project within the FinEstSmartMobility project and offered programmatic access to the ferry schedules and real-time monitoring of ferry locations and schedule accuracy. The API was designed to be used by SmartMobility solutions and also offered a way to study the statistical data of the ferry traffic between Helsinki West Harbour and Tallinn Old City Harbour. The API used fully and freely accessible public Open Data.

Statistics

Basic statistics of the API as per 28 Feb 2019 shows:

  1. That we have collected around 14 million data points during 339 days of operations
  2. That we have tracked succesfully 4388 voyages
  3. That on an average the ferries are very well on time and seem to depart 8.5 minutes ahead of schedule
  4. Arrival accuracy is stellar and on an average the ferries arrive 2.8 minutes ahead (!) ahead schedule


How it worked

The API was built as a Node.js server application and fetched data from various publicly available Open Data sources (ship AIS-data, schedules, ship parameters, historical tracks and weather observations). It then analysed the ship sailing parameters and derived the schedule tracking information. The end product was a set of json-format APIs, which were documented using Swagger UI.


How you could obtain an API key?

In order to use the API, you needed an API key.

The Tracking API data was updated once per minute and was therefore not to be called more often than this (since there is no new data anyway). The Weather observation data from Helsinki Majakka and the Gulf of Finland wave buoy was provide by FMI under the CC BY 4.0 license and could be accessed for the last 7 days.

Please note that we logged the usage of each key for statistical purposes as we were interested to know how much the API was utilised.

How to access the historical data?

You can access the historical tracking data via the dataset at HRI.

We were NOT storing the weather observations into the tracking dataset.

License and disclaimer

See this page for license and disclaimer information.


This work relates to call for Tender: H104-17 / HEL 2017-009942 - Helsinki West Harbour and Tallinn Old City Harbour inbound traffic innovation partnership, service procurement

EU CB FinEst