
Every City Should Have an API: Let’s Start With Watertown, MA - apievangelist
http://blog.programmableweb.com/2011/09/06/every-city-should-have-an-api-lets-start-with-watertown-ma/
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byoung2
For the city of Los Angeles, I would love an API that takes a street address
and an array of options and returns the street parking restrictions that
apply. There are lots of places with confusing signage (e.g.
[http://www.wreckedmagazine.com/images/joeyredmond/typicalpar...](http://www.wreckedmagazine.com/images/joeyredmond/typicalparkinginlosangeles.jpg)),
and it would be nice to get a boolean response to the question "Can I park
here now?"

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jtchang
My god I would love that. Can it have a guarantee that you won't get a parking
ticket? Just kidding.

That said with a tool like that wouldn't the # of parking tickets issue by any
city go down and thus they would have an incentive not to allow such a tool to
be widely deployed?

I swear that parking signs are deliberately put up to confuse people so they
can get more revenue!

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byoung2
Well, according to their mission statement, their goal is not to generate
revenue, but _"to ensure transportation routes in Los Angeles flow safely and
are not blocked"_ (<http://ladot.lacity.org/tf_Parking_Enforcement.htm>)

Of course we know the real reason is $$$. But if we take them at their word,
providing access to this data would help them achieve their goal by helping
motorists park properly and legally.

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bokchoi
Check out data.gov.uk. They have APIs for lots of data for almost everything
including legislation, schools and roads.

    
    
        http://data.gov.uk/linked-data
    

Here is a road:

    
    
        http://transport.data.gov.uk/doc/road/A454
    

Jenni Tennison writes on her blog about the use of RDFa, Microdata, URLs,
versioning of URLs and other interesting topics:

    
    
        http://www.jenitennison.com/blog/node/140
        http://www.jenitennison.com/blog/node/141

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blahedo
The original post this refers to is at
[http://www.mattmacdonald.com/2011/08/20/api-access-
questions...](http://www.mattmacdonald.com/2011/08/20/api-access-questions-
for-tyler-technologies-creator-of-munis/) where Matt, the Watertown resident,
wrote to TylerTech. Apparently they responded with a letter I'll paraphrase as
"no."

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thomaslangston
The answer was not "no", it was "We won't discuss the private details of a
client's (the municipal government) system, please contact the client
directly."

Original Text

"We value our relationship with our clients and are committed to protecting
their privacy and security protocols. I have shared your request with the town
and would direct you to the Town of Watertown for information regarding your
request."

~~~
delinka
And this is a proper response from the vendor. The vendor should not attempt
to get involved with political decisions about what should be available and
what should not be available. They honor their contract, they stay out of
trouble.

If the town officially holds the position that the information is "non-public"
or "secret," then you go to the courts, not to the vendor.

Now, if the town agrees and goes to the vendor and the vendor says "no" or
"that'll be a 10x increase in fees," it becomes the town's responsibility to
find a compliant vendor.

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chsonnu
Maybe Watertown is different but every local government I've had to deal with
is crawling with luddites.

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untog
It's a slow process, for sure. It's difficult to even explain the utility of
an API to the non tech-savvy until you show them an app that uses the data.

I live in NYC and they're doing a great job- but change isn't immediate. I'm
really interested in the area of governmental data- I feel like there's a
need/use for an open wiki style directory of info, but
<http://opengovernmentdata.org/> is already a good resource.

~~~
ddw
I agree that it's a slow process, but it's happening. At the city level, it's
good to have someone within the Mayor's office or City Council that really
cares about it. It's starting to happen here in Philly with
<http://www.opendataphilly.org>

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dadro
I've wanted to do something similar except with Real Estate transaction data
in the state of MA. Most residential real estate transaction data is available
via each counties registry of deeds website
(<http://www.masslandrecords.com/malr/controller>). The challenge is much of
this data is stored using proprietary systems with limited (or no) APIs and
different counties use different systems.

Much like with Real Estate data, the biggest hurdle with this initiative is
there is no standardized convention from one city to another. With data being
all over the place it makes developing a community driven data gathering
platform "wicked hard". What I think would be a good starting point is define
some standards so that when the ad-hoc data is transformed it follows an
agreed upon convention. This approach would allow for a centralized data
sharing platform to be developed making data available via all kinds of
different formats(RDF,JSON, etc).

tl;dr: Awesome idea but comes with some difficult challenges.

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brianshumate
Shout out to PDX API by Max Ogden: <http://pdxapi.com/>

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joshklein
Fred Wilson @ Union Square Ventures is a proponent of NYC Big Apps. I believe
he's on the judging panel?

Here is where ideas are submitted: <http://nycbigapps.com/>

Here are finished apps:
<http://www.nyc.gov/html/mome/digital/html/apps/apps.shtml>

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gtracy
I did this, but for a specific city service in Madison, WI. I built an API for
the Madison Metro bus service that provides a nice web service for developers,
but does ugly screen scraping behind the scenes.

<http://www.smsmybus.com/api/>

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zachwill
Max Ogden (a fellow at Code for America) has been working on a site to help
turn Excel spreadsheets and CSV files into usable JSON APIs for developers.
You should check out datacouch.com — might be of interest.

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Mizza
Matt has a website where he posts all of his awesome projects and dealings in
his efforts to open up Watertown: <http://www.mattmacdonald.com/>

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rnc000
Lots of open datasets can be found at <http://open.mflask.com/>

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majmun
there should be API but for programming the city. and regulations written in
programming language.

