When governments open up their data to the public, they don’t necessarily know what people will make out of it.

For example, we’re pretty sure Adelaide Metro weren’t expecting a team of data developers to use bus trip data to create this hypnotic visualisation of the journeys of their entire fleet over 24 hours.

Each bus is represented by a small point of light. You can watch the buses originate and then flow all the way into and out from the city. Some move fast – look at the O-Bahn, for example. Others take a more ponderous, winding journey – out to Mt Barker, for example.

One thing is consistent – the whole 24 hours of the visualisation is mesmerising.

The video was built by a user posting under the name STLTransit. The account appears to be linked to Sumus Technology, a Canadian IT firm.

According to STLTransit’s about page, the visualisation was made using Adelaide Metro’s publicly released transit feed.

The State Government’s open data repository, data.sa.gov, has highlighted STLTransit’s work, along with a range of other projects, on their apps and ideas page as a way of showing the power and potential of open data.