Open Data Challenge for Public Transportation 2025 – powered by Project LINKS – is an application contest aimed at open innovation using public transportation open data.
Railways, buses, airlines, ferries, and shared bicycles. Association for Open Data of Public Transportation, in collaboration with the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism(MLIT), is working nationwide to make Japan's public transportation data — often said to be the most complex in the world — available as open data.
This contest will also collaborate with the MLIT's "COMmmmONS" project to promote digital transformation of regional transportation, and will work to make data on demand transportation public, as well as to enrich data on barrier-free access.
We look forward to the passionate challenges of developers from all over the world, who will use data to create new services, resolve social issues such as eliminating "traffic gaps" and combating overtourism, and realize digital transformation of regional transportation.
2025.07.01 Open Data Challenge for Public Transportation 2025 web page was launched.
Open Data Challenge for Public Transportation 2025 will host webinars and hackathons for developers and transportation operators.
What's Project LINKS
Project LINKS is an interdisciplinary DX promotion project by the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism (MLIT).
By reconstructing various administrative information that has not been utilized so far as "data" and making it usable, the project aims to promote evidence-based policy making (EBPM) and realize the creation of new businesses (open innovation).
What's COMmmmONS: Regional Transportation Digital Transformation Project
COMmmmONS Project by MLIT regards regional mobility resources as a common social infrastructure accessible to all, or "commons," and promotes the creation of best practices in digital transformation that will solve regional transportation issues through the four pillars of services, data, management, and business processes, as well as the standardization and horizontal deployment of the results.
Grand Prizes in Open Data Challenge for Public Transportation 2024
Cycle-Shortcut: Beat the Winding Rails
Past Grand Prizes
1st
Tokyo Trains
2nd
My Bus
3rd
Mini Tokyo 3D
3rd
UpNext
4th
Tratal – Transport Information Portal 2021
4th
Mitu-yoho
4th
Public Transportation Irregular Event Notifier (PIEN🥺) for Tokyo
You can see these works below.
Past Contests
