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codeforsanjose / Project-Ideas

Hey have an idea for a Project? Post it here! See the Waffle version here:
https://waffle.io/codeforsanjose/Project-Ideas
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Create a tool for looking up affordable housing rentals #60

Open ericagaraffo opened 8 years ago

ericagaraffo commented 8 years ago

The Dataset: The City of San Jose has published four affordable housing datasets on the open data portal under the "Quality of Life" Dashboard: http://data.sanjoseca.gov/dashboards/9388/quality-of-life/

The dataset lists the development name, contact information, address and property website for affordable rental properties in San Jose.

The Challenge: Create a map, app or other tool that uses this dataset to help residents find useful information on these topics.

Can you come up with other easier to use, visually interesting or fun ways to access or display this data?

chenyu-ed-lee commented 8 years ago

Hi guys,

I did some digging into the APIs and I found out the output of the data is formatted strangely. For example, if you go here http://data.sanjoseca.gov/dataviews/226206/affordable-housing-under-construction/ and make the API call provided (with their API key), you will get an object with all the development names, addresses, phone numbers, etc. However, instead of grouping each row entry as one object, each item (addresses, phone #s, etc.) is its own object. This makes difficult to iterate through the data set and get only the addresses.

This is just my finding after poking at it. If you have any questions, feel free to ask away.

mthong commented 8 years ago

@chenyu-ed-lee Thanks for sharing your experience with the API. A few others noticed this last Saturday as well. It's important feedback for the City's Open Data Architect @artitangri and hopefully she will be able to pass this on to Junar. Would you be willing to talk to Arti on the phone to describe the problem to her, if she needs more information? If so, please email me your contact information at mthong@gmail.com.

evankroske commented 8 years ago

@chenyu-ed-lee, until the API is improved, you can use the CSV download as an API. It's under Export > Export as CSV.

3vivekb commented 8 years ago

@chenyu-ed-lee I recommend doing what @evankroske says but you can have the api call return a csv as well - change data.json to data.csv - http://junar.github.io/junar-manual/api-en/build/html/_sections/section-02-supported-methods.html. The csv doesn't return data as a bunch of tiny objects.