The last bi-monthly report about the development of KDE Itinerary ended with a teaser for indoor map support for train stations and airports. This also dominated the work in the past weeks, and has made considerable progress so that the first features based on that have been integrated.

New Features

For every train station or airport in the itinerary timeline, it’s now possible to open the integrated indoor map view. While that already brings quite some value for locations with decent data quality (which seem to be mostly larger train stations at this point), things get a lot more interesting when looking at deeper integration and leveraging OSM data beyond just showing a map. In a few places one can already get a glimpse of what might be possible.

For finding a gate or platform, we currently only have a list for manual selection, but that’s obviously the first step towards automatically selecting the right place based on your reservations. What’s also visible is that this is already making use of data about public transport lines provided by KPublicTransport.

Dialog box for selecting a train station platform, showing departing public transport line logos for each platform.
Train station platform finding, showing departing lines.

When picking an element on the map, we can show a number of additional information available, such as opening hours, accessibility information, payment methods or available dietary options for restaurants. While this is also mostly still just forwarding OSM data, it’s easy to imagine to eventually have filters or search options for all this.

Information box for a selected map element showing opening hours, contact details, payment and accessibility information.
Information box for a map element.

Indoor maps isn’t the only new feature in the app though, we can now also show vehicle load information for public transport operators providing that information. That’s useful when looking for an alternative connection, and specifically nowadays when a very crowded train can be a bigger issue than just being a minor discomfort.

Alternative connection information using a color seat icon to show expected vehicle load.
Colored seat icon indicating the expected vehicle load.

Infrastructure Work

There’s also a lot of work needed behind the scenes to support the indoor map support, in particular regarding providing up-to-date OSM data for it. See the recent posts on the necessary data and updating maps.kde.org for this.

Another also data-related change is the new support for Benerail station identifiers. This consists of a new property for Wikidata, the inclusion of that in KItinerary’s lookup tables, and the use of that for resolving station references in e.g. Thalys barcodes.

Fixes & Improvements

There’s a few more noteworthy changes in other areas too:

  • Besides boarding passes and event tickets, so-called “generic” Apple Wallet passes are now displayed correctly by the KMail Apple Wallet pass plug-in.
  • We fixed an ambiguity in the vicinity of China in the coordinate-based timezone lookup system which was caused by openSUSE patching the IANA timezone database with an additional Asia/Beijing alias, and our data tables being generated on such a system.
  • Seat reservation information from Ouigo confirmation emails are now extracted correctly.

Contribute

While field testing and collecting training samples of travel documents is currently not that easy, there’s plenty of other things that can be done. The KDE Itinerary workboard or the more specialized indoor map workboard show what’s on the todo list, and are a good place for collecting new ideas. For questions and suggestions, please feel free to join us on the KDE PIM mailing list or in the #kontact channel on Matrix or Freenode.