Having the BBC traffic information displayed on a interactive map really gives you a great feel for what's going on around the country. I think it would be especially useful if you were planning a long trip.
As a test, I hacked together a simple page which injects live traffic data supplied from the BBC into Google Maps.
Obviously this prototype is lacking many features, but it's a start.
Excellent. Works really well, appears to be accurate on location.
What a great start - I'd love to see the BBC/Google adopt this and add the lower levels of traffic disruption
This is great, how did you manage to integrate the traffic data and the google maps?
Hi Simon,
It was actually very easy to do. Google Maps fetch XML data from the google website to show locations, business listings and direction data.
In a nutshell what I did was tell the Google Maps website to fetch the data from my own website. Then, I wrote a XSLT transformation which loads the Traffic Data XML available on the BBC website and transforms it into the XML format expected by Google Maps.
As soon as I have some time, I'm going to put a full tutorial up on my website: http://moo.datatribe.net
That is a great idea. I live in Scotland, so hope you start there when you roll it out nationwide!
it's broken!
awesome thanks :)