Building a Farmers Market API in less than an hour for $0. | Hacker News Reader

Building a Farmers Market API in less than an hour for $0.

codeforamerica.org

91 pointsyahelc14 comments

Why an API? The dataset is pretty small. Converting it from Excel to JSON and putting it up for download as one file would be more useful for any task I can think of.

Looks like ~7,100 in the dataset; its definitely not "Big Data", but its definitely sizable. The USDA .xls file is 16 megabytes.

Here's a single datapoint:

    {
      "type": "Feature", 
      "id": "b52fc9c8940ff3885830dc3de305e5ac",
      "geometry": {
        "type":"Point",
        "coordinates":[-122.393,37.7955]
      }, 
      "properties": {
        "_id":"b52fc9c8940ff3885830dc3de305e5ac",
        "_rev":"1-1b07544c7620ff6af55550eb2e3ed66a",
        "Jams":"1",
        "WIC":"1",
        "Vegetables":"1",
        "Street":"One Ferry Building, Suite 50",
        "Credit":"1",
        "Prepared":"1",
        "Soap":"0",
        "Nuts":"1",
        "MarketName":"Ferry Plaza Farmers' Market",
        "lng":"-122.393365",
        "Cheese":"1",
        "SFMNP":"1",
        "WICcash":"0",
        "Zip":"94111",
        "Seafood":"1",
        "Fruit":"1",
        "Herbs":"1",
        "Honey":"1",
        "lat":"37.7955195",
        "Description":
            "The Ferry Plaza Farmers' Market is located at \
             the foot of Market Street and on the Embarcadero \
             at the historic San Francisco Ferry Building.",
        "Flowers":"1",
        "updateTime":"4/14/11 12:02",
        "Website":"http://www.cuesa.org",
        "Bakedgoods":"1",
        "full_address":
            "One Ferry Building, Suite 50, San Francisco, California 94111",
        "Location":"City/ township public building grounds",
        "City":"San Francisco",
        "Crafts":"0",
        "Meat":"1",
        "Maple":"0",
        "County":"San Francisco",
        "State":"California",
        "SNAP":"1",
        "Plants":"1",
        "y":"37.7955",
        "x":"-122.393"
      }
    }

About 1 kilobyte of text. Throw away the GeoJSON boilerplate and the long IDs, compress all the 0/1 fields into a single int (all entries have the same set of them), remove 2 of the 3 redundant copies of coordinates, basically strip away the cruft and you can make it 2x-3x smaller. So optimistically that would be about 3 megs of JSON. And the user can throw away unneeded data even further.

I think the usability advantages of having the whole file available locally (compared to an API) outweigh the disadvantages here.

JSON (slightly scrubbed): https://github.com/imperialwicket/usdaFarmersMarkets

Clustering the markers will greatly improve performance: http://google-maps-utility-library-v3.googlecode.com/svn/tru...

I actually had this same idea a few months back. I'm the developer of truxmap.com, a real-time food truck map, and I wanted to export the concept to farmers markets. However, the USDA data set isn't sufficient because it doesn't include days of the week and times. Nevertheless a map i easier to read than a table.

I have an app in the iTunes Store that covers farmers markets in CA, OR, and WA. If someone wants the code as a starting point for building an iOS app on top of this API, let me know. (I have no time to update it at the moment).

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/farmersmarkitwestcoast/id4139...

I can also get some promo codes if anyone wants a free copy to try first.

Neat, I've used localharvest.org that also provides more in depth information. I wonder if they started with the same data.

Unresponsive script crashed my browser. :\

The data is pretty big (there are a lot of farmers' markets).

The author may want to take a look at the clustering the markers.

http://www.svennerberg.com/2009/01/handling-large-amounts-of...

Great idea! Why is it great? Because it's a technical achievement that is easily understood by the normal web user. It shows how technology can be used in basic ways to make information easier to use. Well done.

Would sqlite be suitable for such a mini database?

impressive!

for more of the food graph, check out realtimefarms.com

Way to go John!

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