Palimpzest Recipes: How To Get Data From An API

[mikecafarella]

We should create a series of short "Palimpzest Recipes". These will be short 1-2 page documents that show how to accomplish a commonly-wished-for goal.

If PZ is perfect, this is basically a documentation task. But of course PZ probably has a lot of problems, which we will only realize when we try to write the "easy story on how to do X" and realize that we can't do it. So accomplishing this task will sometimes mean just writing a doc, but will often mean doing some design and writing code.

In this case, the Goal is: HOW TO GET DATA FROM AN API.

I recommend we try to get it working on, say, different APIs from different genres. Some options include weather (OpenWeather or NOAA), financial (AlphaVantage), and geo/maps (Google Maps).

Here's one concrete application.

We want to build the Last Minute Travel Advisor. The input is a set of US cities. We want to collect some raw data:

1. The price to get to each city from Boston
2. The weather in each city
3. A description of tourist locations in each city

and then generate a 1-sentence description about each city's appeal as a last-minute destination. Some APIs we could use:

1. https://developers.skyscanner.net/docs/intro for flight info
2. https://openweathermap.org/ for weather
3. https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/places/web-service/overview for tourist information

[mdr223]

1. Pick your API(s)
2. Describe a high-level goal you want to achieve
3. Come up with a plan to ingest the API data with a DataReader
4. Describe a high-level PZ program that should run and achieve your goal

[mdr223]

Update:

1. narrowing set of APIs
2. multi-modal images and text for each city; rank them based on user criteria

For next week:

• have set of APIs
• sketch PZ schemas
• sketch contours of PZ program.