About & further reading¶
What Telemachus is¶
A small, open, vendor-agnostic data format for high-frequency mobility and telematics. It does one thing well: define how raw device output (Telemachus) and its enriched downstream layers (enriched, events layer) are encoded, so that pipelines, datasets and tooling can interoperate.
It does not define:
- Which algorithm computes enriched/events layer columns
- Which metrics constitute "good driving"
- Which business decisions to make from the data
These belong to the consumer.
What Telemachus is not¶
- A scoring product
- A commercial dashboard
- A method library
For applied science (papers, methods, benchmarks), see the research companion site: research.roadsimulator3.fr.
Technical formats — one spec, three encodings¶
The same Telemachus data can live in three encodings, each suited to a different tool family:
| Encoding | Use case | Tools |
|---|---|---|
| Parquet (columnar) | Bulk analytics, ad-hoc SQL, cold storage | pandas, DuckDB, Spark, Athena |
| JSON / JSONL (document) | Streaming ingestion, API payloads, message queues | MongoDB, Kafka, REST |
| NumPy / Arrow (in-memory) | Python ML pipelines, zero-copy processing | numpy, pyarrow, PyTorch |
All three are equivalent in content — the JSON Schema
(telemachus_manifest_v0.8.json) describes per-message payloads; Parquet
is the bulk encoding of the same payloads; NumPy/Arrow is how pandas
& DuckDB materialise them in-memory. Choose per tool, not per
semantics.
The dataset manifest (manifest.yaml, SPEC-02) is always YAML
(or JSON equivalent) regardless of the signal encoding, because
manifests are human-read and small.
Typology of related projects¶
| Project | Role | Repo / site |
|---|---|---|
| Telemachus | Open data format & SDK & CLI | this site / GitHub |
| RoadSimulator3 | Synthetic Telemachus generator (simulation) | github.com/SebE585/RoadSimulator3 |
| Research vitrine | Papers, methods, benchmarks | research.roadsimulator3.fr |
Citation¶
License¶
MIT — applies to the spec, the JSON Schemas, the SDK, the CLI, the
adapter examples and the documentation. Datasets shipped under
datasets/ carry their own licenses (CC-BY, CC0, etc.) — see each
dataset's manifest.yaml.
Contributing¶
Contributions of all sizes are welcome:
- Found a bug in the spec? Open an issue.
- Want to add an adapter for vendor X? Send a PR under
python-cli/adapters/. - Want to propose a new RFC? See RFCs → How to propose.
- Want to fix a doc typo? Use the pencil icon on the top right of any page (it deep-links to the source on GitHub).