DX-BASED NAVIGATION LINKED WITH KYOTO CITY BUS LOCATION SYSTEMFOR NATIONAL TREASURE VISITORS
Hiroshi Sunaga†
Mako Kawasaki†††††
Osaka Institute of Technology
ex-student
ABSTRACT
Many tourists take the city bus to visit national treasuresites in Kyoto. In this study, we propose an applicationthat can manage tourist spot and bus service
information. With our application, it is possible toaccess the same information offered by bus companies
by simply touching the bus stop on the street map or on
the bus route map displayed on the phone. In addition,
GPS displays the user’s present location on the map,
which makes it easier to tell where the nearest bus stop
is. It lets them know if there is a bus route that goes
directly to their destinations or if the desired bus iscoming shortly. It also offers easily-browsable basic
information about their destinations before reachingthem. To make this technically possible, we use Android
to create street-map- or bus-route-map pages andimplement functions for necessary information to pop up
and for page transition, which can be activated by touch
operation. The data itself is linked to existing websites,and their key words have been extracted in advance. We
define such data as general-purpose data structure. The
prototype application has received a lot of favorable
feedback.
Keywords: Services Computing, Android applications，Kyoto City Bus, National treasures in Kyoto

whether they should wait until the bus arrives, useanother bus route, or spend time elsewhere.

Fig. 1: Warning display board and Web site
If a visitor wants to go from the current place to a
tourist spot, e.g. a national treasure place, it helps if they
can also find out whether there is a direct bus route to
the place or if the desired bus is coming soon. This
paper proposes a digital transformative (DX) based newapplication with a much more user friendly interface
providing bus approaching information and useful tips
for visiting national treasure places by Kyoto City Bus.
Note that data necessary for implementing thisapplication are currently protected by copyright.
Therefore, we use data retrieved from Web sites andprocess them only for the purpose of making thisresearch prototype.
2.

DATA NECESSARY FOR APPLICATION

2.1. Bus approaching information1.

BACKGROUND OF THE STUDY

Kyoto, one of the most popular tourist destinations in
the world, is home to numerous cultural assets including
a number of national treasures, and tons of visitors takethe Kyoto City Bus to travel around places that havethese treasures. This is because the bus often takes themnear these places and affordable one-day tickets areavailable. However, the bus service is unstable andbuses are not always punctual.
In view of these situations, the Kyoto Municipal
Transportation Bureau has installed warning display
boards showing the approach of buses in the operatingarea (Fig. 1). With this equipment, visitors can tellwhich numbered bus is approaching the bus stop evenwhen there are bus service disruptions. Also, visitors canaccess their Web site that provides the same information[1] from the user's smartphone. Visitors can judge

The Kyoto Municipal Transportation Bureau offers
timetable data as an open data set [2], with which somewebsites provide timetable or transit information searchengine services. It is presumed that "Bus and Train
Veteran -Arukumachi KYOTO Planner-" [3] and"KYOTO CITY BUS SEARCH" [4] use the open dataset.
The official Kyoto City bus location site requires
rather complicated procedures to obtain necessary
information the user needs. First, the user needs todesignate the bus stop by entering the name or bus stop
number, or by using GPS information. Then, the site
shows all the combinations of route numbers anddestinations as candidates, from which the user is asked
to select up to five candidates. Only after that can theuser get bus approaching information (Fig. 2). Our
application can omit these steps and obtain information

intuitively. Our application provides bus approaching
information by designating a positon on the street map
or bus route map as show Fig. 3. The street map typemay be easier to use for visitors, while the route map
type may be preferred by users familiar with the district.

research purposes. As a website comprehensively
covering national treasure information, displaying
photos and providing bus access information, we choose" Kyoto ni Kanpai (Cheers to Kyoto)" [7]. To construct
our application, the following data are necessary, i.e.,
historic site names, treasure names, treasure types(building, statue, painting), general information abouttreasure places, URLs for relevant sites, URLs fortreasure photos, names of the bus stops near the treasureplaces, and the bus numbers. These data are structured
in the JSON format.
3. IMPLEMENTATION TECHNIQUE
3.1. Bus approaching display

Fig. 2: Warning display board and Web site(a) Street map type(b) route map typeFig. 3: Proposed application images
It is impossible to construct this application withopen time table data available, so it is necessary toobtain and process data retrieved from the location
system web site. In this paper, we aim at defining a data
structure that can be used by many bus companies in thefuture when the copyright is lifted [5][6]. To this end,
we propose using the JSON format for its versatility.
2.2. National Treasure Navigation Information
There are many sightseeing spots featuring nationaltreasures and they are approachable by the City Bus.
Since these spots do not offer copyright-free open data,
general information about national treasures in Kyoto
City and photo data are obtained from another website.
By using this information combined with bus
approaching information, we construct a prototype for

As shown in Fig.3, if a user touches a city map or routemap, an AlertDialog window will pop up. In thiswindow, several bus approaching information subwindows are displayed by using WebView class of theAndroid System. By touching a positon, a specific bus
stop is identified and the bus stop data related to thisstop is retrieved from the JSON data. The JSON data areconstructed as described below.
There are about 700 bus stops in the Kyoto City Bus
service area. First, all the names of relevant bus stops
need to be collected. From the bus stop name search
page of the Kyoto Municipal Transportation Bureau site,these names and bus stop codes can be obtained. For
each bus stop, there are URLs to provide bus
approaching information which is displayed by routenumber and destination. The total number of the data ismore than 5000. The data obtained in the HTML formby accessing these sites are analyzed. To narrow down
the HTML source text to essential information, theregular expression handling mechanism is used.
Also by using the latitude and longitude for eachbus stop, mapping between a positon in the map and bus
stop information can be done. In the route map case,relative positon data for all the bus stops are necessary.
To obtain the data, we make a special program whichshows the bus route map and gets x, y coordinates for all
the bus stops touched by the programmer. These
coordinate data are mapped with bus stop information.
The JSON data structure is shown in Fig. 4. The
obtained data from Web sites are managed in Stringarrays. Our JSON making program converts array data
to the JSON format. The bus stop number and name,latitude/longitude, x/y-coordinates, and approaching
information block are grouped as JSONObjects. The
information block is a JSONArray, which contains
elements constructed with the bus number, destination
and approaching information URL as JSONObjects.
We use the OpenLayer API [8] to show the map. In
an HTML file, JavaScript programs are coded.
Functions are added for displaying the map in thedesignated center position, getting the latitude andlongitude of the point touched and drawing circles at thedesignated latitude and longitude. This HTML file isloaded in the WebView element of the Android System,
on which Web browsing is possible.
When the user starts navigating the street map, thesystem gives GPS data to the WebView element to set amap center at this position and then the JSON data arepassed to bus stops in the map. The JavaScript programjudges what bus stop is touched on the map and thennotifies the bus stop name to the WebView handlingprogram. The program shows all the buses approaching
the bus stop in the WebView.
In contrast, the route map is displayed byconverting the route map file to the Bitmap instance.
Then, by retrieving all the coordinates from the JSON
data, a square is drawn at each bus stop position by thedrawRect() method as shown in Fig. 3 right. When theuser touches a square, the program judges what bus stop
is touched and a WebView is created as in the city map
case.

Fig. 4: JSON data structure- names and keywords for national treasure buildings,
statues and paintings, defined as "kyototreasures.json"- links to each detail page, defined as "spotlinks.json"- links to photo URLs of the spots, defined as

Fig. 5: Option page and selected detail page"treasureinfo.json"
As for "kyototreasures.json", the data structure is shownin Fig. 6.
In the pop-up there is a link to a Web site. A
TextView element including plain text of <a> tag for
the URL does not work for the purpose of pagetransition.
Toeffectuateit,first
theLinkMovementMethod.getInstance()methodinstantiates the MovementMethod class. Then, thesetMovementMethod() method sets this instance to avariable (url_link). The link URL text (html) istransformed by the Html.fromHtml() method.
Moreover, it is set to url_link by the setText() methodwith casting of CharSequence.

3.2. Navigation to Sightseeing Spots
The navigation capability supports visitors to nationaltreasure places with its bus approaching information.
The user can access this information by pop up view orpage transition. The following data elements arenecessary to make it possible:- list of national treasure buildings, statues and paintings- URLs to Web pages provided by each spot
- Bus stop and route number information near each spot
- URLs to national treasure photo sites
When the user selects a national treasure page, thelist of national treasure places is displayed as shown inFig. 5 left. If one of the buttons is touched, a window
will pop up as shown in Fig.5 right. It contains its photo,keywords, the link to the detailed explanation page ofthis spot, and the link to the bus approaching
information page. This window is constructed as an
AlertDialog containing TextView, Button, WebView
and link elements.
To implement the selection page, necessary data, i.e.,
the names of sightseeing spots, are extracted from theHTML text of the relevant site [7]. The data required forthe detail pages and bus information are as follows:

Fig. 6: JSON structure for treasure information
Fig.7 shows a list of links to attractions at thedesignated spot. These links are processed as describedabove. The right half of Fig.7 shows a photo of thedesignated attraction from the linked photo site.
Fig.8 shows the linkage between bus stops and bus
operation information. The left half lists major stops
along the user’s bus route. The right half shows bus
approaching information of a selected bus stop. Notethat only the designated bus stop and two preceding
ones are displayed to show whether a bus is approaching
one of the three stops. Together with the JSON data ofFig.4, the bus stop numbers and names per bus route arenecessary. The Fig.9 data are defined for this purpose.

evaluate its different aspects on a scale of 1 to 5 (5 beingthe best) and it received an average score of 4.3 for its
usefulness, convenience, and user-friendliness.
Our future research challenge involves situations
where bus stops are abolished, moved, or where theirnames are changed. We would also like to provide
transfer information between multiple buses.
5. REFERENCES[1] "Kyoto City Bus Location System for Mobile",
http://www2.city.kyoto.lg.jp/kotsu/blssmart/index.html

Fig. 7:

List of attractions and photo site[2]"KYOTOOPEN
https://data.city.kyoto.lg.jp/node/14553

DATA",[3] "Bus and Train Veteran -Arukumachi kYOTO Planner-",
http://www.arukumachikyoto.jp//index.php?lang=en[4]"KyotoCity
bt.sakura.ne.jp/index.html

BusSearch",

http://kyoto-[5] "Kyoto City Bus Operation Information Notification
System by Voice Interaction", http://sap.ist.i.kyotou.ac.jp/members/kawahara/paper/bus-navi.pdf[6] Hiroshi Sunaga, Takashi Aihara, Rina Furukawa, "Services
Computing Based Mashing-up of Practical Applications",
IEICE Technical Report, SC2012-9 (2012-08).

Fig. 8:Linkage between spot and bus information[7] "Kyoto ni Kanpai (A Toast to Kyoto)",https://www.kyotonikanpai.com/purpose/culture/cultural_prop
erty/kokuhou.shtml[8] OpenLayers, https://openlayers.org/

Fig. 9:Bus route data JSON

4. CONCLUSION AND FUTURE WORK
We proposed an application that can simultaneously
manage tourist spot and bus service information in order
to effectively travel around sightseeing spots withnational treasures in Kyoto. To construct a versatile
application, we defined a general-purpose data structurethat can be used not only in Kyoto but also in othercities.
With regard to our approaching display application
prototype, a survey was conducted on 20 people whohave done some sightseeing in Kyoto. We asked them to