Redevelopment of NOC Into a Relational Database Kieran Holmes John Prince

Background NOC was developed in 2010 for Transport Direct Its aim was to :- – provide a unique identifier for every bus operator in England, Wales & Scotland and for this code to be applied to all data managed by Traveline for these operators. – It was felt that a unique ID code would allow for the unambiguous identification of operators and their services and would assist with the identification of duplicates, for example between different datasets provided by different organisations

Issues With NOC Developed as an Excel spreadsheet – still maintained in that format, although development into a relational database was recommended – Problems of managing an unwieldy set of data with 2,924 rows and 46 columns – The data in NOC clearly hasn’t been kept up to date There were errors in the original NOC that have never been corrected Operators no longer providing services Operators having changed names Entries that are clearly wrong

Development of a Relational Database Essential first task was to cleanse the data – Remove errors – Try to identify operators no longer providing services – Reduce the number of errors in the data as they would impact on a relational database That cleansing has largely been completed, although there remain a number of problems and queries

Consultation Traveline circulated a consultation document Responses were received from a number of people and organisations Traveline has considered and responded to the comments that were received – Some proposed sensible changes to NOC, others were more contentious and some could not be actioned The end product is a proposal from Traveline for a new relational database