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Amsterdam Airport Launches API Platform
- robschia 10y agoI think this is revolutionary and opens the door to new kinds of applications. No airport that I know of offers some kind of API.
- whkr1 10y agoDoes anyone know why they won't let you store their response data for more than 24 hours? Seems like you're not really allowed to do any analysis on it, only present it.
- jacquesm 10y agoHow would they even check?
- marak830 10y agoI would imagine it's so that they could pull your access if they found you publicly sharing comparison data(rg how often a flight is delayed due to loading) or some such.
- notahacker 10y agoThat's exactly why they won't let you store their response data. They want the data used to build apps to help consumers board their flights or get picked up on arrival, not benchmarking dashboards for third parties to assess on time performance and the efficiency of its baggage handling service, besides which the airport itself is likely subject to restrictive licence agreements for some of the data supplied in the API.
- yitchelle 10y agoI wonder what other data centers would benefit from having an API available. Imagine an API to access container movements at the Port of Singapore, or Port of New York.
- mrkgnao 10y agoHaving watched season 2 of The Wire last week, that brings up some interesting ideas...
- lb1lf 10y agoIf this (eventually) leads to the possibility of one -1- properly designed and implemented airport app rather than me having a couple dozen different apps installed, all buggy and crash prone and with hardly any common UI features at all - then I'm all for it...
- mind_heist 10y agoHey, Can I ask - What are some of the airport/flight app you currently have on your phone ?
- ElijahLynn 10y agoNot OP but I have 0. I travel maybe 1-3 times a year and I usually install it for the trip then delete it. Airports/flight/airlines are PRIME candidates for Progressive Web Apps.
- austinl 10y agoI've found Kayak's app to be pretty useful + up to date for tracking flights. You can input a flight number, or search for flights based on departure and arrival airport. I haven't found any other app that reacts to delays or gate changes as quickly. I believe they get their data by aggregating a lot of individual sources (https://www.quora.com/How-does-Kayak-get-all-information-from-all-those-travel-sites https://www.quora.com/How-does-Kayak-get-all-information-fro...) https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/kayak-flights-hotels-cars/id305204535 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/kayak-flights-hotels-cars/id...
- lb1lf 10y agoHere's the ones I use most often: Avinor (Norwegian airport authority), Schiphol (Closest hub), Kastrup/Copenhagen (#2 hub (of sorts)) and Frankfurt. Then there's all sorts of second tier airports which have their own apps of sorts - say, even Dyce (Aberdeen) has one, though I am not sure it is an official product. Add to that that any airline worth its salt has got at least one app, and it soon adds up...
- rebootthesystem 10y ago
- theCricketer 10y agoNice, great first step. It would be great to start this experiment and eventually come to an API spec that all airports could implement. There is a lot more incentive to build great apps if they can be used at all (or many) of the hubs.
- twiss 10y agoThe Dutch railways have an API as well: http://www.ns.nl/en/travel-information/ns-api http://www.ns.nl/en/travel-information/ns-api
- lucb1e 10y agoAnd it will happily tell you train X departed from Y when in reality you're in that train and stuck at two stations before Y. I have a logger running, but I'm pretty sure the data will turn out useless as I've noticed this was not unusual to happen. Note: the trains have GPS and you can follow them in the official NS API (or if you reverse the app, or use a site that did that). NDOV is much more up to date, though not perfect either. In short: no API gives you actual truth based on GPS or something°, and the NS API itself is unreliable and unmaintained (their app is way beyond what is provided to the public). ° you could say this is nearly impossible, but one could use their GPS and align trains to a track within 15 meters of the reported location, then determine whether it's on schedule. Train tracks are pretty much perfect in OSM data (and I think there are official sources in some weird format from the 80's it seems, designed by HP of all companies) so that's a fine source. There are also sites that interpolate expected position based on schedule and delay data with surprising accuracy (50 meters on a good day I'd estimate, or 500m or so on average), so it's not hard to compare expected vs. actual and determine a delay. Source: worked on rpln.nl since they killed their mobile site in favor of 5 megabytes of "responsive javascript". Came across a lot of stuff while doing that, and we're still working on features and feature parity with the official stuff (we're feature compatible with the old mobile site, even bookmarks work if you just update the domain, but not as far as the official site because of the unmaintained api).
- martinald 10y agoThe UK NR API is pretty awesome. It is a STOMP feed of every train passing location. So it is pretty much exactly accurate, as the train physically has to pass the reporting sensor for it to update. If the train hasn't passed that sensor, it doesn't move. While not 15m accuracy it's pretty damn good. Probably <500m in urban areas and ~1-2km in rural areas.
- xnyhps 10y ago
- Freak_NL 10y agoReading this headline (as a Dutchman) my brain went „Amsterdam has its own airport?” before going „Oh right, Schiphol…”. (Compare this to a New Yorker reading about New York Airport instead of JFK.)
- superioritycplx 10y agoSchiphol's IATA code is AMS, therefore it's the Amsterdam airport. :)
- notahacker 10y agoIt also officially named Amsterdam Airport Schiphol, has the words "Amsterdam Airport" in its logo, and appears as Amsterdam (AMS) in flight searches. It's not like there are any real alternatives for flying into Amsterdam
- DonHopkins 10y agoFlying into Bijlmer is not a viable alternative. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Al_Flight_1862 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Al_Flight_1862
- icebraining 10y agoThing is, NYC has three airports (JFK, LaGuardia and Newark Liberty), whereas Amsterdam only really has Schiphol.
- Freak_NL 10y agoOh the confusion doesn't lie there; ask anyone about an airport near Amsterdam and they will think of AMS. it's just that for most Dutch, Schiphol (AMS) is a national airport rather than just Amsterdam's airport. So 'Amsterdam Airport Schiphol' sounds pretentious but correct, whereas 'Amsterdam Airport' just doesn't click — like adverbs without a noun.
- fkooman 10y agohttps://developer.schiphol.nl/apis/flight-api/conditions https://developer.schiphol.nl/apis/flight-api/conditions Has some serious restrictions in its use. You are not allowed to "cache" the data for more than 1 day? Strange. And of course you need an "API key". It is public data, just make it public. HTTP/HTML is also an API, just a bit more cumbersome to parse than JSON.
- riquito 10y agoIt's easier to limit who misbehave that way
- yati 10y ago> HTTP/HTML is also an API, just a bit more cumbersome to parse than JSON. No it's not, HTML can change anytime. It is meant for human consumption. "API" has the word "Interface" in it because there is a well defined interface to a service, and is documented, and is meant for machine use predominantly. > API key While I agree with you, I also think it is important to be able to disable applications that might be misusing the API quickly.
- Analemma_ 10y ago> And of course you need an "API key". It is public data, just make it public They will want some kind of mechanism to cut off abusive traffic, and API keys are a much better choice than IP blocks.
- literallycancer 10y agoI wonder if you could use APIs like this along with some pattern matching to detect rendition flights.
- pmyjavec 10y agoTitle should be "Schipol Airport...", I had to make sure it wasn't April 1 yet!!!!
- brianbreslin 10y agoAs someone who works with a lot of flight data and has to buy it from third parties, its amazing how poorly this data is distributed usually. I hope they license their data to third parties so we don't need an api call for each airport though.
- kayhi 10y agoWhat 3rd parties are offering it for purchase?
- notahacker 10y agoThe likes of FlightStats and OAG Flightview will supply flight status information (amongst other aviation data like schedules databases). I think the codes for when bags are unloaded are proprietary and unlikely for most airports to share.
- brianbreslin 10y agoyeah OAG's api is VERY inconsistent though.
- brianbreslin 10y agoFlightstats OAG Flightaware those are the most popular
- TazeTSchnitzel 10y agoVaguely related: the security of airline passenger data is atrocious. https://media.ccc.de/v/33c3-7964-where_in_the_world_is_carmen_sandiego https://media.ccc.de/v/33c3-7964-where_in_the_world_is_carme...
- kevin488 10y agoInsanity. This is so ripe for fraud it's unreal. I don't know of a single person who would not fall for the targeted phishing attack that was highlighted in the video. If I got an email from someone who looks like the airline I just booked with with all my info (email, name, date, departure, arrival airports, etc) that said I need to update my credit card, I would.
- diminoten 10y agoThis looks like it's using Swagger under the hood. I've never been a big fan of including source and documentation in the same files, because it makes the code harder to scan/understand.
- cottsak 10y agoYep. That's a .NET application serving up that API.
- elastic_church 10y agobut... why though? what use would just one airport be?
- alkonaut 10y agoIs there a standard for this? If not, are they trying to make one? Seems it's of pretty limited value to have an app for one airport, so what you want is an app that can show info for multiple airports. Such an app would be a lot more likely to exist if at least a subset of the API was standardized.
- donkeyd 10y agoThey've joined the Dutch Open Hackathon for the past two years. I don't think the main goal of this is a third party Schiphol app, I think they want to enable people to use their data in different services. For example: A Hotel app that checks when your flight departs and shows you the best time to take the shuttle bus. When you get a delay, it could give you the option to get a last-minute late check-out, or to book a dinner.
- ciderpunx 10y agoI find the use Aircrafts as the plural of Aircraft kind of sweet https://developer.schiphol.nl/apis/flight-api/aircrafts https://developer.schiphol.nl/apis/flight-api/aircrafts
- jakobbuis 10y agoSeems like an intentional pluralization miss to keep "consistency". I'd prefer to closely reflect the clients terminology though.
- yAnonymous 10y agoSeeing as they also use APIs and API's, I don't think it's intentional, but badly written.
- atomwaffel 10y agoOr written by people whose native language isn't English, which is a possibility.
- donkeyd 10y agoIn Dutch, 'API's' is correct. This is probably a mistake while translating.
- manuw 10y agoNice. I have recently figured out that Lufthansa has also a API https://developer.lufthansa.com/docs https://developer.lufthansa.com/docs
- ruairidhwm 10y agoAlso worth checking out in this area is the Amadeus API! https://sandbox.amadeus.com/api-catalog https://sandbox.amadeus.com/api-catalog
- frankgeerlings 10y agoThere seems to be a degree of overlap between this Schiphol API, the Amadeus API and https://www.developer.aero/ https://www.developer.aero/ which is from SITA. I wonder how they all relate. I would not be surprised if this simply exposes data that it passes through from the SITA or Amadeus APIs, or vice versa. I'm not entirely sure how Amadeus and SITA relate BTW.
- ruairidhwm 10y agoDefinitely. Disclaimer that I'm temporarily working at Amadeus. SITA is a similar company. It's likely that the Schipol API is powered in some way by Amadeus or SITA, or both. Really cool tech and there's a lot that can be developed through the open APIs but they're not very well known about...
- roemerb 10y agoCool! I live very close to the airport, right under the 'Polderbaan' landing/takeoff strip. I think I can use this to write a microservice for fun that will tell my when planes are going to fly over my house, causing the earth to shatter.