Developer Best Practices

If you are creating an app, keep these helpful tips in mind.

Keep it bilingual

Ottawa is a bilingual city, with both English- and French-speaking populations contributing to its vitality and character. We encourage you to develop your app in both official languages so that the whole city can benefit from it. Multi-lingual apps that can serve Ottawa’s multi-cultural communities would also be appreciated.

Stay up to date

Our service information can sometimes change quickly. Please stay up to date to avoid providing your users with out of date information. If we find that you are distributing outdated information, we may ask you to update your information (see Terms of Service).

Don’t forget to cache

While our servers are quite powerful, please remember to cache your data. Try to minimize the number of requests you need to make from our servers by caching data that doesn’t change often, such as bus stops and bus numbers. If a user of an API is causing deteriorating performance on our primary web services, we may need to limit access.

Further Help

There has been significant interest in transit data. While we cannot provide support in creating applications, we will provide you with some helpful resources. If you have any questions, suggestions or concerns regarding how the API works, please reach out to the community at groups.google.com/group/dataott.