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Tag Archives: APIs
iGov
The Atlantic published an article entitled "iGov: How Geeks are Opening Up Government on the Web" by Douglas McGray that discusses API Documentation and examines the possibilities when government agencies allow access to their raw data in an open, standard file format. The article uses the BART system as an example:
Turns out, it didn’t. In 2007, Google engineers asked public-transit agencies across the country to submit their arrival and departure data in a simple, standard, open format—a text file, basically, with a bunch of numbers separated by commas—so Google Maps could generate bus and subway directions. A handful of agencies, including BART, decided to go a step further and publish that raw data online. Once they did that, any programmer could grab the data and write a trip planner, for any platform. “It’s not 1995,” BART’s Web-site manager, Timothy Moore, explained. “A single Web site is not the endgame anymore. People are planning trips on Google, they’re using their iPhones. Because we opened up our schedule, we are in those places.” “We can’t envision every beneficial use for our data,” Moore told me. “We don’t have the time, we don’t have the resources, and frankly, we don’t have the vision. I’m sure there are people out there who have better ideas than we do. That’s why we’ve opened it up.”Continue reading
Lunchtime Listen: Greg Elin on One Click Disclosure
Here is a short, informative interview from NPR. You can listen online or download. It is only about 6 minutes long -- more of a coffee-break listen! One Click Disclosure, On the Media, (January 16, 2009). "Government spending data has long been publicly available but it's never been easier to find and interpret. That's thanks to USAspending.gov, a site created by the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act of 2006 which was sponsored by Tom Coburn and Barack Obama. The Sunlight Foundation's Greg Elin explains what makes the site so revolutionary. " Continue reading
NY Times Announces the Congress API
Announcing the Congress API, By Andrei Scheinkman and Derek Willis, New York Times, January 8, 2009.
The initial release exposes four types of data: a list of members for a given Congress and chamber, details of a specific roll-call vote, biographical and role information about a specific member of Congress, and a member’s most recent positions on roll-call votes. The four work together, so you can start by retrieving a list of members, find the one(s) you’re interested in and then fetch additional details through other calls. We built this service to work with other publicly available data sources, so you can identify members of Congress with a seven-character code from the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress. For individual member responses, we included the numeric ID assigned by GovTrack, a free and open-source service that monitors legislative activity. Our data comes directly from the U.S. House and Senate Web sites, and is updated throughout the day while Congress is in session....You have to register for an api-key to use the system, but it is free (for now). Check it out here! (Note that this an API and returns XML so that you can build live data applications. You agree not to "archive any of the API content for access by users at any future date after you have finished using the service...." It is for building interactive applications.) Continue reading
APIs in 15 Minutes
There is a lot of talk about making data accessible via APIs, but there is also a lot of confusion about what this means, how to do it, and why it is beneficial when the average citizen cannot make heads or tails of an API. API stands for "Application Programming Interface" but typically what we are discussing when we talk about APIs around data is a way to access data in a machine readable format. A machine readable format is something that is more or less understandable by a computer program, so that it may be used to present data in new and interesting ways. The house.gov website has a listing of all representatives by state but a computer program has no way of knowing how to understand this listing. A more useful listing might look like an excel (or CSV) file that listed each congressperson's name in the first column, state in the second, and so on. This is the fundamental advantage of an API, it makes data available in a way that a computer program can understand so that more complicated things can be done by such a program. (eg. draw a map with states colored according to their representatives' party affiliations) A side effect of this computer readable format is that it is possible to ask more useful and specific questions of the data. When you go to the above house.gov site it is possible to get a listing of all Representatives, but it is impossible to say "show me all representatives that are Democrats from North Carolina" or "show me all representatives named John." With an API this kind of query is typically very simple, as an example in the Sunlight Labs API this could be done by going to a URL like http://services.sunlightfoundation.com/api/legislators.get?state=NC&party=D. It is the availability of these APIs that have allowed all sorts of interesting sites that combine data from multiple sources known as "mashups." One of the earliest and most popular examples was a site called HousingMaps that combines Craigslist housing data with Google maps. A handful of APIs exist to help make government data more accessible, through which it is now possible to make mashups using government data. A rich sampling of them includes:
- Sunlight Labs API
- Capitol Words API
- FollowTheMoney API
- GovTrack.us API
- MapLight.org API
- NYTimes Campaign Finance API
- OpenSecrets API
- Project Vote Smart API
- Watchdog.net API
NYTimes Announces Campaign Finance API
The New York Times has just announced an API that makes available the data they have gleaned from the Federal Election Commission's electronic filings for the presidential candidates.
"The initial version of the Campaign Finance API offers overall figures for presidential candidates, as well as state-by-state and ZIP code totals for specific candidates. In addition, the API supports a contributor name search using any of the following parameters: first name, last name and ZIP code."This allows people with the appropriate technical skills to build mashups and other web services that take a look at donations by individual or by area with relative ease. In essence it is now possible for web developers to create views on this valuable data that previously would have involved digging through millions of FEC electronic filings. It should also be possible for researchers with moderate technical knowledge to analyze the individual contributions going to candidates to perform statistical and other analysis on what makes for a very interesting dataset. The New York times providing this service is certainly a positive step towards helping people make use of what is one of the richest (pun not intended) datasets the federal government has to offer. Continue reading
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