When we gave this workshop, we asked the audience "What kind of APIs do you hope exist, or know exist and want to know more about?", and asked them to discuss ideas with their neighbors. We got a lot of interesting answers and hope that after our workshop, people from the audience are better equipped to start exploring their ideas. Below is an annotated version of the answers we got, with our comments in bold.
Book data
There's many APIs where you can look up information about books based on ISBNs or other identifiers. The Open Library is one of the Internet Archive's projects, and (like Wikipedia), it's content is user-contributed. You don't need an API key to request information from the Open Library API. If the book is in the public domain and Project Gutenberg has digitized it, you'll find a Project Gutenberg identifier in the API response, which lets you locate freely available online version of the book. This blog post discusses the book APIs that you can use from ISBNdb.com, Google Books, and Amazon.
Dog Tinder
NOAA
I want to make Twitter bots
Great! We have a Jupyter notebook to get you started.
Sensor data from cars
What does Google know about me?
Lead pipes in the area
**We're not aware of any open data or data available through an API about the locations of lead pipes in Allegheny County, but the PWSA has published a map showing the results of their inspections, indicating which lines are and are not made of lead. To see the information about whether individual parcels have lead lines, either zoom in on this map to the parcel level or search for a particular address.
Mascots
Info about animal hybrids
Air quality
We actually have a sample notebook about using WPRDC data on local air quality, too. Another great resource is the Environmental Protection Agency's AirNow site which has an API that lets you pull historical air-quality measurements, current measurements, forecasts by ZIP code or latitude/longitude, and even contour maps of air quality.
Restaurants data
Happy hours
Census & federal data
For Census data, we can recommend the Census Bureau's CitySDK, and its query builder, and also the Datamade Python wrapper for the Census API as useful tools. Be forewarned: For the uninitiated, the way the Census groups and organizes its data may seem byzantine and very different from the other kinds of data structures you'll see from more recently developed data sources.
Deliver me food
Fire calls
The WPRDC has records of fire incidents for the city of Pittsburgh, and that data can be downloaded and queried through our API.
Library history
Ticketing systems
Mine Google searches
Pittsburgh start-ups
Voter registration
Weather (x2)
There's a bunch of APIs that will give you weather data/forecasts. Virtually all require API keys and most have limits on how fast you can pull data. The Dark Sky API is one we can recommend, as it's nice, quite accurate, and currently allows 1000 free API calls per day.
Twitter bots but also computational biology visualization tools
Where are they testing autonomous cars?
GitHub
What did my neighbor just Google?
API for individuals rating similar to credit score
Restaurant health inspection results
The WPRDC has a subset of this information for Allegheny County: We have all of the food-facility inspection results where violations were reported, updated on a regular basis. It would definitely be convenient to have this information in a more readily accessible form, so that if I'm thinking of going to a restaurant or about to walk into one, I can easily check the restaurant for recently reported food-safety problems.
Amazon
Price-compare grocery store items (pull data from Target, Giant Eagle, etc.)
Building permit dataset on WPRDC
ADA compliance
API for lost-and-found items
API with the best rate/price for an item
The ISBNdb API apparently provides price comparison for books.
API that lists restaurants with ratings/reviews
It should be possible to get this information through Yelp's API, though as we mentioned in the workshop, read the terms of use, as there are sure to be restrictions on what you can do with that information.
Routes based on road quality
Where can I park?
More neighborhood-level data
Arcade video games
Health care automation for scheduling purposes
API for scheduling health-care appointments (x2)
Voter registration
Stormwater simulation
Send it a picture, tell me what it is a picture of
Create running routes based on Strava/MapMyRun/GoogleMaps data
Sports scores