Community Data Science Workshops (Spring 2015)/Day 2 Projects/Socrata

Building a Dataset using the Socrata API and data.seattle.gov

In this project, we will explore a few ways to gather data from data.seattle.gov using the Socrata API. Once we've done that, we will extend this to code to create our own datasets of civic data that we might be able to use to ask and answer questions in the final session.

Goals

• Get set up to build datasets with the Socrata API
• Have fun collecting different types of data from data.seattle.gov
• Practice reading and extending other people's code
• Create a few collections of different types of data from Socrata that you can do research with in the final section

Download and test the Socrata project

If you are confused by these steps, go back and refresh your memory with the Day 0 setup and tutorial and Day 0 tutorial

(Estimated time: 10 minutes)

• Windows
• OS X
• Linux

Example topics to cover in Lecture

• explain Socrata open data platform, exists on other government websites
• navigate to api page and show the documentation, point out examples
• introduce the API sandbox as a tool for building queries
• looking at the images within a page http://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&titles=Seattle&prop=images&imlimit=20&format=jsonfm
• change the city with a custom URL
• edit count http://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&list=users&ususers=Benjamin_Mako_Hill%7CJtmorgan%7CSj%7CMindspillage&usprop=editcount&format=jsonfm
• get the content of the main page http://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?format=json&action=query&titles=Main%20Page&prop=revisions&rvprop=content
• example programs: wikipedia-raw1-unicode-problems-example.py (note: this is an example of Unicode problems when running this on Windows), wikipedia-raw2-mudslide-edit.py

Resources

• API documentation for the query module
• API Sandbox
• Sample API queries
• Example that saves command-line output into a text file: python wikipedia-raw2-mudslide-edit.py > OsoRevisionData.txt