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. <a href="http://www.wreckedmagazine.com/images/joeyredmond/typicalparkinginlosangeles.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://www.wreckedmagazine.com/images/joeyredmond/typicalpar...</a>), and it would be nice to get a boolean response to the question "Can I park here now?"
Check out data.gov.uk. They have APIs for lots of data for almost everything including legislation, schools and roads.<p><pre><code> http://data.gov.uk/linked-data
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Here is a road:<p><pre><code> http://transport.data.gov.uk/doc/road/A454
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Jenni Tennison writes on her blog about the use of RDFa, Microdata, URLs, versioning of URLs and other interesting topics:<p><pre><code> http://www.jenitennison.com/blog/node/140
http://www.jenitennison.com/blog/node/141</code></pre>
The original post this refers to is at <a href="http://www.mattmacdonald.com/2011/08/20/api-access-questions-for-tyler-technologies-creator-of-munis/" rel="nofollow">http://www.mattmacdonald.com/2011/08/20/api-access-questions...</a> where Matt, the Watertown resident, wrote to TylerTech. Apparently they responded with a letter I'll paraphrase as "no."
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 (<a href="http://www.masslandrecords.com/malr/controller" rel="nofollow">http://www.masslandrecords.com/malr/controller</a>). The challenge is much of this data is stored using proprietary systems with limited (or no) APIs and different counties use different systems.<p>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).<p>tl;dr: Awesome idea but comes with some difficult challenges.
Fred Wilson @ Union Square Ventures is a proponent of NYC Big Apps. I believe he's on the judging panel?<p>Here is where ideas are submitted: <a href="http://nycbigapps.com/" rel="nofollow">http://nycbigapps.com/</a><p>Here are finished apps: <a href="http://www.nyc.gov/html/mome/digital/html/apps/apps.shtml" rel="nofollow">http://www.nyc.gov/html/mome/digital/html/apps/apps.shtml</a>
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.<p><a href="http://www.smsmybus.com/api/" rel="nofollow">http://www.smsmybus.com/api/</a>
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.
Matt has a website where he posts all of his awesome projects and dealings in his efforts to open up Watertown: <a href="http://www.mattmacdonald.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.mattmacdonald.com/</a>