JSON API for Portland, OR civic data
PDXAPI is a GeoCouch instance populated with data from the City of Portland, Oregon through CivicApps. Out of the box CouchDB provides a RESTy JSONP capable API to all of the data.
- Create an easily consumable data resource for developers interested in utilizing Portland civic data
- Modify and build upon the city’s publicly released data by allowing users to edit and contribute data, and even start whole new datasets
- Create automated processes for synchronizing with the original data sources (City of Portland, Metro, TriMet)
- Create tools and examples for developers to use as a jumping off point for creating ‘civic apps’
- Wiki-style revision history and conflict management/dispute resolution when users contribute to datasets
This repository hosts two separate things… the CouchDB web application (CouchApp) that powers PDXAPI and also some helpful utilities for converting and uploading geographic data into GeoCouch. The only dependency for hosting your own PDXAPI-like geo-server is GeoCouch. The pdxapi_couchapp folder contains the full CouchApp for you to tweak and deploy.
If you want to actually use PDXAPI, see pdxapi.com for more information and example usage.
The basic usage is to ask PDXAPI for all objects in a database contained within a particular bounding box. You can see an example of this on the PDXAPI.com homepage. You will receive a GeoJSON feature collection that contains any matching objects. Each object consists of some location data and an ID that you can use to look up metadata for the object by asking http://pdxapi.com/dataset/id
If you are interested in working with a local copy of some PDXAPI data, the easiest way is to set up your own GeoCouch and replicate the datasets that you want using CouchDB’s built in replicator tool.
The utilities directory contains a bunch of geospatial related utilities developed for PDXAPI that are no longer in use, but may be useful as a reference.
datasets.yml is a dataset containing information and metadata for all of Portland’s municipal datasets.
GeoCouch can store, index and serve GeoJSON. There are awesome tools like ogr2ogr that are capable of converting many different formats into GeoJSON.
I wrote a tool called shp2geocouch for easily importing Shapefiles into GeoCouch. See my blog post for a tutorial on this process.
- shp2geocouch is a rubygem that converts Shapefiles into GeoCouch databases.
- Food Cart Pages is an example web application that uses PDXAPI as it’s data store.
- Food Cart Finder Mobile is an example mobile application (native iPhone and Android) that uses PDXAPI as it’s data store.
(The MIT License)
Copyright © 2010 Max Ogden
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