Civic Innovations

Inspired by a recent Open City project that repurposes data on sewage in the Chicago River, I wanted to work through a quick example of turing a web page that houses useful information on water quality in Philly into an API.

Here is a quick screencast showing how easy it is to take information rendered as part of a standard HTML page and turn it into a useful JSON API.

It goes without saying that as more and more data producers in government learn about how data can be repurposed by others – both inside and outside of government – we’ll see more and more valuable information exposed as structured data and APIs. Viva #opendata!

Until then, there are some very powerful tools available for turing web content into powerful, reusable APIs.