WSU students design transportation Web site for region

Their project seeks to help disabled people find rides in 4-county area.

By James Cummings
Staff Writer

[source :Dayton Daily News, Friday, May 22, 2009 ]

Students in the information system program at Wright State University Raj Soin College of Business say they’ve gotten pretty good at solving textbook problems.

But now as seniors they’re getting the chance to work on real world information and management systems where the answers aren’t already worked out and recorded in the professor’s class manual.

“Everything we’ve done up to now has been graded,” said Teddy Hinnefeld. “You get an A or you get a B, and that’s it. Here the work we’re doing really matters.”

Hinnefeld along with fellow seniors Marcus Turner, Brandon Brock and Mark Willman were assigned to a project that eventually make it easier for disabled people and others from the area who need transportation to find rides.

Professor Barbara Denison said other senior projects include developing an artist guild web site and designing radio frequency identification applications.

The transportation project group is working with the Greene County public transit organization Greene CATS to develop a database that brings all the human service transportation information in Greene, Montgomery, Miami and northern Warren County together into one searchable Web site.

“With the aging of the population, there’s a huge growing need for public transportation that can serve the disabled,” said Emily Demeter, mobility manager for Greene CATS. “But right now, there’s no single agency that knows what every other agency is doing.”

Through the Miami Valley Regional Planning Commission, Greene CATS sought an $8,500 federal grant to develop a web site that would be available both to transportation agencies and to the general public.

A person with a wheelchair, for instance, would be able to go onto the site, input information on their age, income, address, physical limitations and desired destinations and get a list of providers available to provide service.

The students quickly realized the work was going to be a lot harder than Greene CATS officials thought. Their source document, a human service transportation directory from the planning commission, was in paragraph form, and the agencies who submitted information all organized their information in different formats.

“We’ve been reorganizing everything in terms of cells,” Turner said. “Each agency will have to answer the same questions so we can put the answers in the same cell, like what area they serve, what are their eligibility requirements, are they wheelchair accessible.”

The database design is to be completed in June, Demeter said, and the students will also provide a handbook to instruct the transportation providers to supply information in a format that matches the database. She said the goal is to have a web site up and running by about December.

Contact this reporter at (937) 225-2395 or jcummings@DaytonDailyNews.com.