J1 Travel/J1 Earthquakes: Maintenance

As a continuation of the work started earlier this week, we have now fully re-implemented our systems to monitor Tokyo (Kanto area) railways other than JR East (there were no issues with our JR East monitoring).  

Tokyo Metro, Toei, TWR (Rinkai Line), Tama Monorail and the Yokohama Subway are now getting status service from the Open Data for Public Transportation (ODPT) API interface.  This interface also includes support for Japanese to English translations of train information messages originated by each railway company as well as the message parsing to determine overall line status.  The translated messages will be made available on the J1 website and on the J1 Travel Twitter and Mastodon pages. The filtered Japanese version of the tweets will be made available on the J1 website. The frequency of inquiries from ODPT has been increased from every 5 minutes to every 2 minutes. 

Seibu, Keisei, Keio, Odakyu, Tokyu, Yurikamome, Tobu and Keikyu will now be fed through their Twitter updates.  Tweets will be filtered to remove extraneous information such as date and time headers, hashtags and website URLs.  The filtered tweets will then be translated into English.  The translated messages will be made available on the J1 website and on the J1 Travel Twitter and Mastodon pages.  The filtered Japanese version of the tweets will be made available on the J1 website. The frequency of inquiries has been increased from every 5 minutes to every 2 minutes.  

Travel updates from JR East will remain at every 5 minutes.

Travel updates will operate 22 hours a day from 4AM to 2AM, Japan Standard Time.

Using restored hardware, we have reinitiated the JQuake program which is injected into the audio chains for J1 HITS, J1 XTRA and J1 GOLD to provide warnings on earthquake advisories (Shindo intensity 3 & 4) and earthquake alarms (Shindo intensity 5 lower, 5 upper, 6 lower, 6 upper and 7) as well as tsunami advisories.  J1HD is not a part of the warning system due to it being broadcast on US terrestrial radio stations. JQuake is only used for triggering alarms on the audio streams.  We use other existing interfaces in order to retrieve earthquake and tsunami information for display on the J1 websites as well as the REC/J1 Earthquake Early Warning page (eew.j1fm.tokyo).