Add Rate My Professors API for accessing professor ratings

pittcsc / PittAPI

An API to easily get data from the University of Pittsburgh

https://pittapi.pittcsc.org

GNU General Public License v2.0

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Add Rate My Professors API for accessing professor ratings #130

Closed Richie78321 closed 3 years ago

Richie78321 commented 3 years ago

Created a new script ratemyprofessors.py for accessing Rate My Professors data via their exposed Apache Solr endpoint.

There is currently support for:

Querying for professors by name (also including a fuzzy option that uses a more expensive but error-tolerant string edit distance algorithm).
Querying for professors by ID.
Making a custom Apache Solr query.

Definitely a lot of room for expansion and improvement here, and I am open to suggestions on both fronts!

Also, feel free to share opinions/concerns as to whether this belongs in the Pitt API. My perspective is that it is data that is relevant to Pitt students (in fact this was built to supply the Pitt CS Wiki with data), and therefore it should be accessible to Pitt students.

Richie78321 commented 3 years ago

Any takers @azharichenko

azharichenko commented 3 years ago

I'm going to be reverting for reasoning I gave a while ago. ratemyprofessor is one of those things that should be installed separately because it applies much greater than just Pitt meaning it's a layer of complexity that we don't really wanna support (honestly this code could be used to make a really nice and simple rmp scraper). A good question is how is this different from sports API which uses ESPN to gather that data. The answer would be there was no immediate API from Pitt to get this information that applies directly to the university and is fairly simple in complexity. Unlike, RMP which is more subjective information about professors and is data that Pitt doesn't/should have.

varughese commented 3 years ago

What about an addons folder or something in the Pitt API? It's still data related to Pitt

azharichenko commented 3 years ago

I'd think it would be more generally beneficial if @Richie78321 just made another repo and got his code in there (with a few modifications to reduce pitt stuff) and push up his own package for rmp scraping. I'd be down to have this under PittCSC, it's just I don't think it quite fits with PittAPI

Richie78321 commented 3 years ago

Yeah that's reasonable. For now I'll just keep it in my fork but as the wiki's scraping needs grow I'll likely throw it into its own repo