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Comment by ricktdotorg | Hacker News Reader

50 years from now, will cities provide "APIs" for residents to query & access city data and services? will i be able to "REST" some "JSON" telling me when the tree around the corner that my dog likes best was last watered? i would love this.

note: "quotes" used because who knows what interfaces will be the saveurs du jour, then.

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The average city is swimming in data these days. Many expose it through various APIs. The Socrata platform (disclaimer: I work there) is one example of many.

For instance, here's Edmonton's tree dataset: https://data.edmonton.ca/Environmental-Services/Trees/eecg-f...

API docs are here (there's an API button on the top right of the first linked page that takes you here): https://dev.socrata.com/foundry/data.edmonton.ca/eecg-fc54

Example query - 10 most recently-planted trees bearing edible fruit:

https://data.edmonton.ca/resource/eecg-fc54.json?$query=sele...

50 years? Try Iceland, right now. http://docs.apis.is/ APIs for gas stations, concerts, TV schedules, school syllabi...

Thats great, gonna play around with that

Those Vikings are sure damn smart...

My city (third largest in Spain) already has APIs for querying static and real-time data: http://gobiernoabierto.valencia.es/en/info-api/

My father owned a tree service in the town I grew up in. We spent countless hours driving around town, looking at different trees and giving estimates for trimming and removal. I could imagine leveraging this data as almost a Zillow for trees.

Lots of cities now have open data. Paris (France), for example, has both fixed datasets and real-time ones: https://opendata.paris.fr/

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