BerlinFlyer wrote:
And – surprise, surprise – as far as I know commercial products decided to integrate Autorouter – because it has an API.
No. They decided to buy it and integrate it because it is a good product not because it had an API.
As someone who claim to be successful IT guy you should notice the difference between the examples you listed (two categories: commercial products interested to increase their visibility and monetize on advertising or commercial products with proprietary non-shared data) and EuroGA.
I appreciate your detailed post, Berlinflyer.
Twitter’s success and its vast ecosystem is mainly based on its open API strategy they’ve had from the beginning. Google Maps wouldn’t be as popular without the option to embed it to any website easily – as Google said back in 2005 when they’ve launched the Maps API
This is not relevant – these outfits make billions from advertising, and they can afford to throw a few breadcrumbs to the great unwashed on the floor, to help them make even more 
Their “open APIs” are done purely to help them take over the world and make even more $$$. Even my little business gives Google a few hundred per month for their search rankings! And my Google shares are up some 400%.
The result is that at least me personally only post on eddh.de
I don’t know about you specifically personally but in the general case, and having read the pretty aggressive comments on the German domestic site, and elsewhere where our project was attacked, I would respectfully suggest it is because you are German That is how Europe works. It isn’t one country, one culture, and never will be. We are stuck with that and have to work with it, so everything takes much longer. And if say Albania had Europe’s largest GA community then this debate would be playing out over there instead.
All of those reports are badly designed (yes, sorry Peter, also including yours – the display experience on mobile for entries is basically unreadable).
WHY WHY WHY did you not report your “basically unreadable” user experience??????????
Let me guess why not. Would you have reported such a crappy user experience to a German site? Let me guess that one, too. If you think I am p1ssed off at reading this, you are 100% right. The original thread was promoted to the home page banners 12x and made Sticky 4×. And emails went out to everyone here registered to receive emails.
FWIW, 525 reports later, nobody else has reported this absolutely crappy user experience – after the initial testing and a lot of work on the CSS. IF you would like to improve our project, please post your device type, screen size, a screenshot, etc, and we will try to simulate it. Please post it in the database thread. Or just email me.
and it took a Steve Jobs to build a joint music store with ALL artists available.
SJ made $$ billions. Everything Apple do is purely to make more billions. So this is irrelevant.
a well documented API. I don’t find that surprising, as Achim (without knowing him personally) has a strong background in IT and understands the value of APIs.
I do/did know him well. He is a very clever programmer, and put in time equivalent to 100k-300k€. I was involved with the project from Day 1, as a part time admin and beta tester. And I was involved with earlier route generating projects. He did not have a day job (sold a software company to Oracle some years ago – this is in the public domain) so had lots of time to put into this. I don’t know anybody else in such a position. He also had a colleague who wrote the original AR code (as a unix executable) and was around to work on it, AFAIK unpaid. The plan was to capture the market and then moneytise it. I have no idea what the plan is now – if there is indeed still a plan, but obviously capturing the market isn’t possible anymore. Now he flies a TBM and is out of our GA sphere, basically. He did it when he had time, lots of it, there was a gap in the market, and he flew a Cessna 182. Would he start this today? I doubt it. So this is a bad example, too.
And – surprise, surprise – as far as I know commercial products decided to integrate Autorouter – because it has an API.
Garmin licensed it and are paying for it. Of course AR would do an API for them. But not for anybody else who then sells a $100+ product incorporating autorouting So this is irrelevant, too.
I know APIs. I build them every day. Right now I am up to my neck in embedded C, RTOS code, processes communicating via APIs.
If I would be somebody of those database operators mentioned above, I would actually make an effort, talk to all the other guys in order to persuade them to merge their database entries in a central database
They have been asked by various people in the past and rebuffed the suggestions. Maybe when our database is a lot bigger (when people start flying properly again) I might have a go at this.
With such a database, lets say with EuroGA, PPL/IR, eddh.de and you-fly merged, I am sure commercial operators like Foreflight but also maybe smaller ones like AeroPS or perhaps even Skydemon (I know they’re a small company) would pay to integrate this database into their products.
FF is a commercial product. They won’t give away their data.
SD is a commercial product. Likewise.
AeroPS I strongly suspect massively exxagerate how many airports are participating 
They could even build a functionality then when a landing on an airport was detected, you will get later a push notification nudging you to rate the airport and thus contribute to the DB.
Nice idea; would require code running on the client to detect your location etc. A lot of people would really hate such a nagging feature, BTW. IOW, an app. Great project, but nobody will do it and maintain it for free. As with most things in IT, the last 10% of the spec involves 90% of the work, if you want a smooth job done. An app is a continuing project; even more than server-side code.
Of course I agree with your idealism Berlinflyer. A lot of idealism went into EuroGA too. The #1 problem is the broken European culture, which when it comes to doing anything concrete is basically nationalist (apologies for using a word which has a strong meaning in some places, but it is accurate in its modern meaning – just look at what has been happening with the vaccine business). It gets more so as you go up the age spectrum, and most of GA is not exactly “young”.
If this was the early days of the “internet” as most know it today, say 2000, a project like this, properly promoted across Europe, and of necessity funded by advertising, could have been big today. Would have still been a massive struggle, with airports being incredibly backward and many still using fax for PNR/PPR not many years ago, so to get them to link-up to a database would have been resisted. Even now, AeroPS must find it incredibly hard to get airports to participate on the fee payment angle (which is how they hope to fund themselves) simply because any glitch in that system will enable a pilot to fly away without the airport getting paid, and it is pretty obvious that collecting money afterwards will be hard work, and you will probably lose that airport as a client immediately. But today is 2021 and we have to cut our coat according to the cloth.
I will happily admit that if I had expert-level server-side skills (config, admin, databases, PHP, Ruby in the case of our forum, JS, all the security angles, etc) then a lot of little things and some big things would have been done. It is simply very efficient to do stuff yourself. When David (an expert on all these things) was involved he did a lot of great stuff, very fast and very well. I know this well, having been doing embedded hardware and software since ~1980. One can be incredibly productive, especially when without a girlfriend But as soon as you have to get others to do stuff, you either have to pay them per hour, or motivate them some other way (and be prepared to tear your hair out, as anyone running volunteer projects will know) and having seen some struggles I would rather just pay
Like I said above, let’s wait for people to get flying again, for the database to grow, and then we can talk to some of the others regarding integration or whatever and it will be done from a much better position.
@Patrick wrote:
I really, really don’t understand your sentiments. If you take the time to contribute, wouldn’t you be the happier the more people can benefit from your contribution?
As somebody who built successful IT companies and has been in the IT space more than 20 years, I always find it mildly astonishing that people still question the usefulness for an API.
A main driver of innovation in the last 10 years have been open APIs. Many companies or products would have been nowhere near where they are now without open APIs. Twitter’s success and its vast ecosystem is mainly based on its open API strategy they’ve had from the beginning. Google Maps wouldn’t be as popular without the option to embed it to any website easily – as Google said back in 2005 when they’ve launched the Maps API: “If you like Google Maps, but think you could do something better, now’s your chance”. Dropbox, Expedia (~90% traffic through API), Stripe, … The list goes on and on. All successful thanks to APIs – and mostly they even didn’t know what people are going to make of it.
Currently there are at least 6 different data sources I am aware of for pilot reports:
- EuroGA
- PPL/IR
- eddh.de
- you-fly.com
- Skydemon
- Foreflight
The result is that at least me personally only post on eddh.de if I ever post, because despite of the messy layout, it’s very easy to use and easy to find. No big registration hassle, just type and good to go. And it’s also my first source to go to, because it usually delivers good and high quality reports. But its usually very German-focussed, which is the downside. But I guess everybody agrees that it doesn’t make sense to check or even cross-post to 7 databases. So this is messed up.
In the end – generally speaking for the GA community, which is small enough anyway – it’s a pity that everybody seems to be wanting to maintain their own data silo (and thinks THEYve got the best DB and UX to access it) and not teaming up. The result is a bad experience for everybody. All of those reports are badly designed (yes, sorry Peter, also including yours – the display experience on mobile for entries is basically unreadable).
I am sure, in an ideal world where we would have one single database of truth and many providers accessing it and also being able to post to it, we would see higher quality reports and better, integrated user interfaces to access them.
Unfortunately nobody does it in the aviation community. I am not blaming somebody for doing their own thing and I am sure everybody (and sometimes even the contributors) have their own reasons for it, as Peter described lengthly. But in the end, if everybody continues to do so, it’s a game which nobody can win.
Maybe the situation is even comparable to the music industry back in the days when they still thought it’s a great idea to have an own store for only their music collection (their music silo) – and it took a Steve Jobs to build a joint music store with ALL artists available.
The only notable exception in the aviation community of a person who “got it” is @achimha with his exceptional Autorouter, which does not only have a lot of built-in interfaces like Telegram but also – a well documented API. I don’t find that surprising, as Achim (without knowing him personally) has a strong background in IT and understands the value of APIs. And – surprise, surprise – as far as I know commercial products decided to integrate Autorouter – because it has an API.
If I would be somebody of those database operators mentioned above, I would actually make an effort, talk to all the other guys in order to persuade them to merge their database entries in a central database with an API (open for reading for non-commercial purposes, protected by API key for writing), keep their existing site but draw their data from the new central API and post new entries to the central database. They could even decide to show “THEIR” entires which have been made through their site first and others later. Endless possibilities.
You could even allow Airports to proudly display THEIR Pireps and their “Rating” on their own airport site by providing a small JS snippet, especially if you get a lot of good feedback (and this might include a “discuss that further on EuroGA” link). Maybe they even want to supply their fuel prices to a central DB like this. Who knows.
With such a database, lets say with EuroGA, PPL/IR, eddh.de and you-fly merged, I am sure commercial operators like Foreflight but also maybe smaller ones like AeroPS or perhaps even Skydemon (I know they’re a small company) would pay to integrate this database into their products. They could even build a functionality then when a landing on an airport was detected, you will get later a push notification nudging you to rate the airport and thus contribute to the DB.
And everybody would benefit from that. Maybe the aviation community would even crowdfund building such a DB when joining forces. And I guess nobody would mind a branding like “powered by EuroGA Aviation Database” – which would definitely strenghten the EuroGA brand. And what we would all get. Easy-to-use websites and Apps, Telegram Bots, whatever. And I am sure there’s even a business opportunity to make money or at least easily cover the costs. But it won’t work without an API and some incentive to open up.
I totally understand if nobody (in this case Peter) is willing to invest the time or maybe nobody wants to open up their data silos or whatever. I am not blaming anybody here for not doing it. But I think it would be a great idea if somebody took the initiative and therefore I agree with Patrick.
Just my 2 cents.
The airports database was set up as a part of the “EuroGA project”.
That should be obvious to all.
That project, in turn, was set up to promote European GA, etc.
An absolutely huge amount of time and effort, and lately quite a bit of money, has gone into EuroGA. Obviously we are not going to funnel the data to all the various (mostly commercial) sites etc and obviously this is why nobody else is interested either, as discussed above.
The database was always readable by anyone. We even made the “visited airports” plotting function available to all, despite the potential for abuse.
The write access is currently limited to those with a EuroGA account which is approved for posting. This is year 2021, not 2001, and any open site will be trashed within days if not hours. The database server gets attacked several times per second… So some form of authentication will always be needed for write access, and this is true for a telegram interface too; see above.
I would be amazed if anyone wanted to write an app. It is a lot of work to do a good job. One needs a lot of experience to achieve a high level of compatibility. Even well funded outfits (e.g. phone companies, banks, etc) produce crap. One is also chasing a moving target all the time, new phones, new versions of android, ios, osx, you name it. Very few apps are done well, and quite a few are only just hanging in there. What tends to happen is that the programmer goes for ios (because that’s what “everybody goes for”) and android versions get left far behind. And he will either get a steady stream of complaints about it not working on new device x, or will do what practically everybody does and ignore the complaints and then we (i.e. me) end up with a lot of hassle. I would confidently predict that if we spent a fair bit of time and money doing an API suitable for an app, there would be a flurry of activity until the guy writing it gets himself a new girlfriend.
Nowadays any solution like this has to work in a browser. That is not without problems but at least one needs to deal mainly with different browsers and device sizes. The current web interface should work on almost everything in current use; if it does not then nobody has reported it Nobody has suggested a better or different layout, and I did a lot of consultation to get the current one originally.
Let’s wait for the CV19 business to die down and get lots of people flying again, and everybody is going to feel better The best thing people can do is contribute reports on places they have been to.
lionel wrote:
I thought the goal was “for European GA”
Yeah. It was created for the greater good, for peace in the world and for contribution in fight against tropical deseases.
Of course it was created primarily for the forum members. Anonymous submitting was added later on request, I’m not sure about anonymous query – maybe it was there from the very beginning. But in my opinion, the purpose of anonymous submitting is more to enable forum members, concerned about privacy, to submit the report anonymously rather than to enable random person who has no relation with EuroGA to report airport experience.
Emir wrote:
the conditions database was originally set “by forum members for forum members”.
Wow. I very seriously misunderstood them then. I thought the goal was “for European GA”, not restricted to “forum members”. Darn, isn’t that why we have, not only anonymous query, but also anonymous submissions, without forum account?
But having said all that, the really most disillusioning responses were those by @Emir and @172driver. Those comments by users/contributors to the project really just make me sad. If that is the spirit here, I might just have to accept that and wish you well, but take my hat and go (with respect to the airport database, has nothing to do with the forum community of course).
As I wrote before, I like to contribute to “my” community and want “my” community to have benefits of it if possible. Your reasons my be different and I don’t see why the option of one (or two) forum members would make you refrain from contributing. Stating the above you sound pretty emotional “if it’s not going to be under my conditions, I won’t participate”. However, “your” conditions unfortunately turned up after the conditions database was originally set “by forum members for forum members”. I regret if someone who contribute to the forum under same conditions can’t accept these conditions for database contribution.
For what it’s worth, if that was the spirit of Wikipedia, there would be no Wikipedia today.
FWIW for some countries (like Croatia) it would be better if there wasn’t local Wikipedia because it’s taken over by group of local nazis (I don’t exaggerate and it’s not about turning up word “fascism” sooner or later in any discussion) and history revisionists. A living proof of good ideas turning horribly bad.
I can see the advantage of the data being easily presented in different ways. I have to admit I would personally be more likely to use an app than the website, and I would prefer a dedicated app to a telegram bot.
I don’t know enough about the ins and outs, so I won’t waste too much space, but is it not possible to create an API with terms and conditions restricting it to non commercial use only, and that the credit must be given to the contributor for any data presented?
Peter wrote:
The issue which everybody is skirting around is that an open API (as opposed to scraping of the website, which as Dimme shows above is quite feasible) would imply the content being lifted and republished on any other website, and of course most of them will be commercial.
A reading-only API is essentially the same as I implemented above, just more efficient on the server because now multiple queries have to be done to fetch all the search page pages.
But if for some reason that is just beyond me, you really, really can’t live with folks reading your airport review in ANY other format than the Euroga web interface
What I don’t get is the emotive and pushy way this is being put.
As I wrote before, we have been contacted by other people wanting open access to the data, all of them having been rebuffed by those running the various other (mostly German) databases. When I pointed this “slight irony” out somewhere I got beaten up and accused of whataboutism – a word I had to google on So… they come to EuroGA, presumably because
The issue which everybody is skirting around is that an open API (as opposed to scraping of the website, which as Dimme shows above is quite feasible) would imply the content being lifted and republished on any other website, and of course most of them will be commercial.
If 1/10 of the keyboard time spent so far was put into thinking up a design for a telegram query, I would have somebody working on that by now! Mentioned previously e.g. here.
