Doing some little research on how routes for buses (and other fixed-route transport) in Thailand is set and evolves over time. From my understanding so far, it kinda started with this PDF from 1954: https://ratchakitcha.soc.go.th/documents/1156537.pdf
Commit
50fbac7
Here. That's the Transport Act B.E. 2497 (1954): §12 lets the committee set routes and how many operators get licensed, via Gazette notice. So the route announcements after it should show how routes changed. Want me to dig into those?
Found it in the Gazette dataset: ~8,000 route notices from the transport control boards. 1955-03-22 is the first Bangkok-Thonburi one: https://ratchakitcha.soc.go.th/documents/1163349.pdf. Snag: OCR text only covers 2002+, older ones are scans. Want me to OCR them?
We'll eventually get to that, and let's use OCR text with text layer in PDF where possible initially. Let's get a general sense of what we're looking at first.
BTW, some preliminary spoilers:
That act will be replaced by this
https://ratchakitcha.soc.go.th/documents/1421074.pdf…
On text: old PDFs are image-only scans, no text layer. The 2021 reform one has real text. Dataset OCR starts 2002. So the text era is ~2002+, roughly 3k notices. Notes are in NOTES.md in the repo.
Correction: the 2002+ text era is 2,462 notices, not ~3k.
Can we make like a database of a changelog of each bus route? So given a route, we can see when it was established, when was it revised, etc. with deep links into the PDF.
On it. First pass: parse route numbers out of the titles (no OCR needed) and see how far that gets us.
Thanks. Prototype an Astro website, and send screenshots.
Known wart, see the Bangkok route 1 shot: air-con ปอ. 1 and ordinary 1 share a page, and the 2021 reform's numbers (4-70E, 5-1) are in the same list. Next could be: split those, then use text layers for the body-only notices. Which first?
Wart? Elaborate pls
Wart = known flaw. Bangkok "route 1" page mixes 3 different things: air-con ปอ.1 คลองจั่น-ปากคลองตลาด (1978, 1982), ordinary สาย 1 ถนนตก-ท่าเตียน (2007), and the 2021 reform notice.
Hmm, still don't get the picture. Feel free to make infographics/diagrams in case it will help my understanding haha
Diagram. A: my "route 1" page merges 3 unrelated things just because the titles say "สายที่ 1". B: your reform PDF is one notice for 258 routes (G/B/R/Y codes renumbered to 1-xx…4-xx), but its title names only route 1. Text layers fix both.
Correction: text layers fix B. For A, the 1978/1982 notices are scans, so that one needs OCR. Next I'll check which years have text layers.
Text layer check, 2 sampled PDFs per year: every PDF from 2002 on has one, every one before is a scan. So 2,355 notices (2002+) are readable now; the other 4,979 (1955–2001) need OCR. Want me to start parsing route bodies for 2002+?
That would be a good next step, but how are you representing the result right now?
Before parsing bodies, I'd change it to: one row per route mentioned in a notice (action, number, name, PDF page, quoted text). Then which mentions are "the same route" becomes a separate layer we can fix by hand. Sound right?
commit 50fbac7
Yes, sounds good. When you extract text from PDF, please put text in a file so we don't have to redo the text extraction every time we source text from PDF.