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ropensci / ozunconf18

repository for the rOpenSci ozunconference 2018
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🚶walkability package🚶 #8

Open njtierney opened 5 years ago

njtierney commented 5 years ago

It looks like there isn't a walkability R package yet. There's a defined API here: https://www.walkscore.com/professional/api.php

This could be a fun package to make to explore interacting with APIs. I imagine the main function would be something like

walkability("University of Melbourne Arts West North Wing Rooms 453-455, Building 148a University of Melbourne")

And the output could be a tibble with columns: walkability, lat, long, message

In terms of output, I could imagine it would be fun/interesting to create a walkability map of Melbourne or other areas in Australia and compare this with things like hospital catchments or other data

hollylkirk commented 5 years ago

I like this! It could be used to compare with urban greening and art projects too...

coolbutuseless commented 5 years ago

I wonder if I mention @hrbrmstr here then this package will magically get written too :)

Lingtax commented 5 years ago

new issue: A bot that trawls the internet, identifies APIs, creates gh issues, and tags @hrbrmstr (jks, of course)

tslumley commented 5 years ago

I wonder if I mention @hrbrmstr here then this package will magically get written too :)

It's magic! https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/walkscoreAPI/index.html

However, I'm not at all comfortable that this complies with the terms of use of the site.

You may not use in your URLs nor purchase or register in any registrar, search engine, referral or advertising service (such as Google’s AdWords) any of the following terms: “Walk Score,” “walkscore,”

and

You will not provide a means to execute any "bulk download" operations

since the package description says "These functions are especially useful for mass data collection and gathering Walk Score and Transit Score values for large lists of locations."

tslumley commented 5 years ago

We're (https://github.com/sa-lee/rwalkable) using OpenStreetMap data (and maybe other sources in the future) to look at nearby 'amenities' and at the connectivity of the road network, which are two components of walkability. Another one is population density, but that seems hard to do worldwide.

hrbrmstr commented 5 years ago

It would have actually, very likely worked @coolbutuseless ;-) Feel encouraged to do so in the future (I don't get visibility into pkg needs as much since I've abandoned Twitter until 2020). The reason for the restrictions for the API are that they have a "research data product" https://www.walkscore.com/professional/research.php (which is not free). It doesn't look like they police it but I wouldn't use it to hit the API unless I was behind a proxy that doesn't store any logs.