What is the purpose of working hard on producing or collecting data if we keep it secretly to ourselves and don’t open it to others?
I’m sure you have tons of data waiting to be shared with customers, partners or developers… It could feed many applications and thus enrich features, content, or even help developing businesses!
Luckily for us, an Open Data strategy is being deployed by many companies and organizations today. Sometimes data can be shared through APIs, but most of the time it will be done through CSV files, Excel files or Google Sheets. In that case, we’ll help you deploy your own APIs out of those files and exploit data more easily.
Use case – Let’s talk about politics
As you might have noticed, we are presently dealing with a very tumultuous presidential campaign in France. The presidential elections will take place on April 23rd and May 7th 2017. One month to go!
Obviously, lots of data are surrounding those elections. And the news group Le Monde decided to collect it and make it public through Google Sheets. Those datasets are one click away and offer: the number of sponsorships from local representatives to each candidate, time spent talking on radio and TV for each candidate, number of meetings and many surveys.
Le Monde also wrote an article and organized the data within interactive charts.
Raw data – Google Sheets Le Monde
Article with charts – Le Monde
Want to use this raw data and create your own dashboards on your website?
We created an API out of the presidential datasets in a glance
Let’s see how we put that raw data into action in a few minutes…
1/ Mobapi account
Duration: 30 seconds
We started by creating a Mobapi account, of course. And we selected the Google Sheets ready-to-use connector.
Select Google Sheets ready-to-use connector
2/ Google Sheet connector setting
Duration: 30 seconds
After having connected a Google account, we indicated Le Monde’s Google Sheets url and chose one of the available worksheet. We’ll create one endpoint per worksheet we want to exploit.
Connect a Google Account
Enter Google Sheets URL and select a tab
3/ Review the data
Duration: 30 seconds
The data is fetched and tested so that we can have an overview of the output.
Review the data
4/ Data transformation
Duration: 2 minutes
Finally, we added some transformations through the API builder to have a proper dates format and transform some strings into numbers.
Apply transformations if needed
5/ You’re ready to go!
The endpoints are now available for you to use in your integrations, all set in 3:30 minutes… Isn’t it simple?
We already created a few examples you can use:
Data has been opened… But O
And if you want to go further, you could also cross this data with external APIs thanks to our server-side code feature.
