
Amsterdam Airport Launches API Platform - bartkappenburg
https://developer.schiphol.nl/
======
lb1lf
If 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...

~~~
rebootthesystem
Random thought: Millions of people used to fly all over the world just fine
before apps and smart phones.

To this day, I print my boarding passes at home and just go. I have never used
an app of any kind to assist in air travel nationally or internationally.
Never missed a flight or had any issues transacting changes or any of the
commonly encountered issues while travelling.

And I do have an iPhone in my pocket at all times.

Same with taking a bus, train, subway, checking into a hotel, etc.

I'm curious. What has changed that someone might need a couple dozen different
apps?

How many of these are solutions chasing problems? Or "just 'cause we can"?

~~~
MrQuincle
In the Netherlands many people who take a bus or train have an app (9292 or
NS). It's one of the most useful apps on my phone.

\+ It tells me when my stop is coming up and I have to press the button to get
out of the bus.

\+ It reminds me to checkout​.

\+ It tells me where to find the bus when I arrive at a train station I don't
know.

\+ It helps me plan my travel so I can leave on time.

\+ It helps me to know when the latest train goes home.

\+ It helps me to find the shortest route.

\+ It tells me if there are still public bikes available at the station of my
destination.

Of course, flying is quite different. Nevertheless I regretfully "did have
issues" with flying.

\+ I have to buy and print ESTA forms every two years.

\+ I have to print boarding passes.

\+ I have to print how to go to my hotel after arriving at an airport.

\+ I have to look at dumb displays to find my gate.

\+ I have to have this paper document called a passport that can be lost and
gets you on Interpol if you're unlucky, but that's another story.

\+ I almost never get a vegetarian meal because these booking agents are
terrible.

\+ Try to do the paperwork if you travel with something fancy, e.g. robots.
"That doesn't look like a laptop, Sir!"

\+ Even making a picture of a carry-on to check if it's the right size might
be helpful, because that's the current attack on the passenger.

\+ If you travel so often, can you take a bottle of coke with you? No, you're
a terrorist.

There are many issues with air travel.

~~~
rebootthesystem
Not convinced. If your phone is dead or stole you can still move around just
fine all over Europe. I have spent a pretty decent amount of time in the
Netherlands in particular over the last fifteen years.

I understand having information conveniently available at your fingertips.
That's great. My confusion had more to do with someone saying they need over a
dozen apps to be able to travel. Sorry, travelling --by any medium-- predates
apps and, for the most part, you don't need much more than a few pieces of
paper.

I would not dare get on a flight while fully depending on data inside a phone.
If anything happens to that phone you are screwed.

~~~
Freak_NL
Welcome to 2017. I know where you are coming from, and I feel the same way,
but we are part of a shrinking group. I pride myself on being able to find my
way around unfamiliar places by simply studying a map beforehand (digital or
paper) and having a basic grasp of the public transport options available
there. When I drive a car, I can get where I want to be by simply using the
signs and essentially just knowing the rough outlines of the topography.

I'm Dutch by the way, and I only ever use the 9292 service to check my
itinerary and look for alternative routes if a delay or service cancellation
occurs (although usually these are announced and/or provided for).

It's great that I am able to open up a web browser or some app before or
during a trip to figure out if my itinerary needs changing or if a connection
can be made, but I can't imagine having to depend on a dozen apps to figure
out something as basic as where my gate is or when I should get out of the bus
— buses announce there stops via scrolling text and usually voice, and why
would you even get on a bus without knowing how many stops you'll be riding or
even which direction it should roughly be heading?

There is a whole generation out there (severely generalizing, but it does feel
this way sometimes) who completely lack the skills for even basic navigation.
Their awareness shifted from actual to digital surroundings, their dependency
on technology gradually increasing.

If people want to live like that; fine. But I find this increasing dependency
on information _fed to you_ rather than actively _sought out_ worrying.

~~~
rebootthesystem
I made it a point to teach my kids how to familiarize themselves with their
own city or a city they travel with using a map before allowing them to use
Google/GPS for anything.

I know so many people who have absolutely no idea where they are and how to
get places simply because they use a navigation app on their phone. Even
simple concepts such as "this is approximately x distance south of our current
location" escapes people who lose all positional awareness due to reliance on
navigation apps.

------
twiss
The 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
And 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
The 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.

------
TazeTSchnitzel
Vaguely related: the security of airline passenger data is atrocious.
[https://media.ccc.de/v/33c3-7964-where_in_the_world_is_carme...](https://media.ccc.de/v/33c3-7964-where_in_the_world_is_carmen_sandiego)

~~~
kevin488
Insanity. 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.

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Freak_NL
Reading 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
Schiphol's IATA code is AMS, therefore it's the Amsterdam airport. :)

~~~
notahacker
It 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
Flying 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)

------
ciderpunx
I 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
Seems like an intentional pluralization miss to keep "consistency". I'd prefer
to closely reflect the clients terminology though.

~~~
yAnonymous
Seeing as they also use APIs and API's, I don't think it's intentional, but
badly written.

~~~
donkeyd
In Dutch, 'API's' is correct. This is probably a mistake while translating.

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theCricketer
Nice, 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.

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alkonaut
Is 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
They'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.

------
brianbreslin
As 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
What 3rd parties are offering it for purchase?

~~~
notahacker
The 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
yeah OAG's api is VERY inconsistent though.

------
manuw
Nice. I have recently figured out that Lufthansa has also a API
[https://developer.lufthansa.com/docs](https://developer.lufthansa.com/docs)

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ruairidhwm
Also worth checking out in this area is the Amadeus API!
[https://sandbox.amadeus.com/api-catalog](https://sandbox.amadeus.com/api-
catalog)

~~~
frankgeerlings
There 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
Definitely. 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...

------
whkr1
Does 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
How would they even check?

~~~
marak830
I 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.

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yitchelle
I 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
Having watched season 2 of The Wire last week, that brings up some interesting
ideas...

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robschia
I think this is revolutionary and opens the door to new kinds of applications.

No airport that I know of offers some kind of API.

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literallycancer
I wonder if you could use APIs like this along with some pattern matching to
detect rendition flights.

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roemerb
Cool! 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.

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diminoten
This 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
Yep. That's a .NET application serving up that API.

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elastic_church
but... why though? what use would just one airport be?

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pmyjavec
Title should be "Schipol Airport...", I had to make sure it wasn't April 1
yet!!!!

~~~
sumedh
Does Amsterdam have multiple airports, if not the title is correct.

~~~
Rafert
The full English name is 'Amsterdam Airport Schiphol', in Dutch everybody
calls it Schiphol (which is also the domain name). The title is incomplete.

------
fkooman
[https://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.

~~~
yati
> 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.

