Accessing Chicago, Cook and Illinois Open Data via PHP by Paul Weinstein.
From the post:
In Accessing the CTA’s API with PHP I outlined a class file I created [footnote omitted] for querying the Chicago Transit Authority’s three web-based application programming interfaces (APIs). However, that isn’t the only open data development I’ve been working on recently, I’ve also been working on a class file for accessing the City of Chicago’s Open Data Portal.
The City of Chicago’s Open Data Portal is driven by a web application developed by Socrata. Socrata’s platform provides a number of web-based API methods for retrieving published datasets [footnote omitted].
class.windy.php provides the definition for a PHP object that wraps around Socrata’s API providing PHP written apps access in turn to the city’s open data.
The general trend seems to be more access to more government data and I suspect the 2012 elections will only speed up that trend.
The question is: How valuable is the government data that is posted? Or to put it more bluntly: Is the data that is released simply noise to cover up more interesting data?
How would you use a topic map to try to answer that question? Can you think of a way to use topic maps to uncover “missing” associations?
[…] Socrata developed the City of Chicago portal, which I mentioned at: Accessing Chicago, Cook and Illinois Open Data via PHP. […]
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