Crash course to Open Data and APIs was presented at Reaktor Dev Day 2013 by Jaakko Rajaniemi and Juha Yrjölä

1. Crash Course to
Open Data and APIs
Jaakko Rajaniemi
Juha Yrjölä
City of Helsinki

2. What is Open Data?
● Availability and Free Access
● Reuse and Redistribution
● For Everybody, All Purposes and
Free of Charge

3. Why open data?
•Efficiency
•Transparency
•New cool and useful apps for citizens!

4. The Classification of Open Data
★ Open license
★★ Machine readable
★★★ Non-proprietary
format
★★★★ Open standards
★★★★★ Linked Data o/

5. Helsinki Region Transport
● Most popular open data source
● API, Kalkati XML dump and GTFS
● http://developer.reittiopas.fi/pages/en/home.php
● Check also http://dev.hsl.fi/

6. National Land Survey
Place names,Roads, Laser scanning
data, Elevation data, ...
See more:
www.maanmittauslaito
Municipal Division in Finland
Topographic database Topographic map raster Basic map raster
Aerial and orto photos

7. Finnish Meteorological Institute
● Weather observation 400 locations
● Weather forecasts
● Street condition 375 locations
● Rain and radar lightning data
● Time series
● https://github.com/fmidev/
● http://en.ilmatieteenlaitos.fi/open-data-manual
● Open Geospatial Consortium
http://ilmatieteenlaitos.fi/avoin-data-avattavat-aineistot
http://ilmatieteenlaitos.fi/avoin-data-havaintoanimaattori

8. Where to find data?
Helsinki Region Infoshare

9. dev.hel.fi
#heldev

10. Code for Europe
● Motivation: Current IT service development
practices not perfect; introduce new ideas
and technologies from outside
● Who: European Union and participating
cities
● Method: Independent Fellows hired for a
limited period to develop services
● 2014 Fellowship coming up

11. Real-time Snowplow Location API
github.com/codeforeurope/aura/wiki/API

12. Helsinki From Above 1942-2012
● Open Datasets used:
○ aerial photography from five decades building
database
○ address database
○ district boundaries
○ OpenStreetMap
● Aerial photos converted into an image
pyramid and imported into Geoserver, then
served over WMS API
● HTML5 application to access it:
dev.hel.fi/ilmakuvat/ (Fork me on GitHub)

13. Service Map API
● 8,000 points of interest
● 800 services
● REST API with more than 200000 hits per month
● http://www.hel.fi/palvelukarttaws/rest/ver2_en.html

14. Service Map API demo
http://dev.hel.fi/open311-test/servicemapdemo.html

15. Issue reporting API / Palauterajapinta
● First read-write API in Finland!
● Based on Open311 (also known as GeoReport v2)
○ http://open311.org/
● http://dev.hel.fi/apis/issuereporting
● Used in more than 30 cities in US and now coming to Europe

16. CitySDK - Common interfaces
between cities
Issue reporting aka Open311 API
developed in other cities
http://www.citysdk.eu/developers/

18. Issue reporting API functionalities
1. Query service request types
○ defines request types and extra attributes
1. Submit service request
○ description, image, location, contact
information
1. Query individual service request
○ status and other service request details
1. Query services requests
○ based on time and location

19. Issue Reporting demo
Service request types:
https://asiointi.hel.fi/palautews/rest/v1/services.json?locale=fi_FI
Last services requests:
https://asiointi.hel.fi/palautews/rest/v1/requests.json
Individual service request:
https://asiointi.hel.fi/palautews/rest/v1/requests/2278m9r1a1f50dhb1mug.json?extens
More queries:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/12eU3RVVTnEfHw1YsV48Li1E6ZGz-WmXoY70T3eIdA9w/edit?usp=sharing
Demos
http://dev.hel.fi/open311-test/pinpoint.html
http://dev.hel.fi/open311-test/servicemap.html

20. Python Three
Three is simple open source Open311 client
from three import Three
>>t = Three('https://pate.affecto.com/restWAR/open311/v1',
api_key='API_KEY_HERE')
>>resp = t.post('202', name='Jaakko Rajaniemi',
lat='60.168321', long='24.952397', description='Traffic
sign is broken.',email='jaakko.rajaniemi@hel.fi',
media=open('traffic_sign.jpg', 'rb'))

21. GeoReporter
Open source mobile application for Open311 reporting
● https://github.com/City-of-Bloomington/open311-mobile/
● https://github.com/City-of-Bloomington/open311-android

22. OpenAhjo Decision Data API
● Access to the enriched decision-making data
of City of Helsinki
● Built on top of document and decision
management system Ahjo
● REST API with geospatial and full-text
search capabilities
● Autogenerated API documentation:
dev.hel.fi/openahjo/doc/
● HTML5 application for browsing the data:
dev.hel.fi/openahjo/

23. OpenAhjo Under the Hood
Backend
● Python
● Django application
● Tastypie REST API
● PostgreSQL database with PostGIS
● Solr search engine with Finnish stemming
Frontend
● CoffeeScript
● Backbone
●

24. Thank you!
Jaakko Rajaniemi
● jaakko.rajaniemi@hel.fi
● +358 40 5165931
● @jaakko
Juha Yrjölä
● juha.yrjola@forumvirium.fi