I'm trying develop some app related to the Olympic Games.
Does anybody know how get info from the page www.london2012.com, like google does in results?
Does an API exist? Where can I find an API?
I'd suppose, maybe it could be done with a url like:
www.london2012.com?country=12
(This isn't real, just what I suppose an API might look like)
When I search "london olympics" for example, I see a "gadget" which shows some results, and I believe that these come from www.london2012.com. Does anyone know if that's true?
I'm not sure which programming language you are using, making it hard to provide an appropriate answer. I doubt www.london2012.com has produced an API just for access, so you will need to make queries (like you said in your post). For example, if you are using Python, you can use the urllib module to write your requests.
However, be warned. I just read over the www.london2012.com Terms of Service (http://www.london2012.com/terms-of-use/) , and you may not use this information for non-personal use.
It is possible though probably not allowed (see terms of service of the website).
You need your app to make a HTTP call to the page URL and parse the HTML response. Obviously the way to do it depends heavily on the language/technology you use, which you did not indicate in your question.
The Olympics use a system called ODF - Olympic Data Feed to distribute real time statistics from games to authorized parties, usually in XML format. These authorized parties consist of accredited world news organizations (so, yeah, google counts), Rights holding broadcasters (broadcasters that pay to have the rights to distrute Olympics content - NBC in US, BBC in UK, etc, etc) and international sports federations. They have dictionaries listed here - but you can't access it unless you are one of the authorized parties above. So perhaps going the python or some other web scraping route is best.
Related
I am trying to wrap my head around Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability. Apparently it's a solution based on Microsoft Dynamics. I need to have more back-end to that solution, because as it is right now I'm either lacking permissions (or extra paid access to Microsoft resources) or missing a chunk of documentation, because I'm unable to:
Change default language across the board - I can switch MS Dynamics to any language I want, but it will work for a shell only. Anything that's CfS specific, is in English. Do I remove the demo data and import my own scopes and data? As only thing available are database and Cube for BI analytics and JSON files describing CfS structure in general (that's in CDM), do I really have to create it from scratch? This brings me to second question:
Access entry-level data that's already in demo version - I need to see what's in the database the CfS is using, or be able to modify it. Is there any way to get to it via Business Central, if at all possible?
Since I will be preparing several presentations for potential customers, I need a way to quickly create a dataset based on initial and very basic information provided by each customer, how can I do that with trial user
I work for a company that's Microsoft Certified Partner, so logically resources for what I need should be available to me, but either links in the documentation are dead (and some are, as they redirect to general info) or require some special access level (or are dead, but error message is really not helpful at all).
Is there somewhere else I can go? The Documentation page offers little towards what I need...
P.S. I think I should tag this question with CfS specific tags, but not enough rep...
I have been looking around for a website that can automatically provide me we content relative to either a city/state combo, or a zip code. Essentially I want to have a bit of content pertinent to where my user actually is. Does anybody know of any online services that provide something like this? I also wouldn't be opposed to spidering content from a site that provides data like this (with their consent obv.)
Thanks!
Addition
I was asked to clarify what I meant by content. Basically all I need is local news for a specified area.
Take a look at http://compass.webservius.com
It's a listing of nearly all businesses in the USA in REST API form, searchable by address / zip code / latitude / longitude / etc. You can also search by industry code (e.g. Restaurants), thus solving the "nearby places to eat" part of your question.
There are actually several providers in this space.
CitySearch which has been renamed to CityGridMedia has a Publisher API where you can get their business listings, reviews, and other services: http://citygridmedia.com/publishers/
fwix's local API also provides basic geographic data along with local news: http://wireapi.pbworks.com/?geo_short=api
GeoAPI was recently purchased by twitter, and it provides a reverse geocoder, business listing information, and a bunch of other services: http://www.geoapi.com/
SimpleGEO also has a very compelling service offering with their mobile SDKs along with their API. You can search by radius, lat/lon, or by address: http://simplegeo.com/
Outside.in also has some great hyperlocal news information which is bundled up into a easy to use API: http://developers.outside.in/
Similar to CityGridMedia, MerchantCircle has an API that provides a listing of states, cities, zips, and categories. Along with business listing information, coupons, and reviews: http://api.merchantcircle.com/api/v1/docs
That's just the tip of the iceberg. There are other API services that specialize in more niche categories like Real Estate, Events, Hotels, etc.
I'm working on a API that will accept addresses in searches. We would like to use Google's geocoding service to normalize the addresses before submitting the search criteria to our search engine.
This caught my attention:
http://code.google.com/apis/maps/documentation/geocoding/index.html#Limits
"Note: the Geocoding API may only be used in conjunction with a Google map; geocoding results without displaying them on a map is prohibited. For complete details on allowed usage, consult the Maps API Terms of Service License Restrictions."
Does this mean we can't use the Geocoding service for this purpose? Having used libraries that access Google's geocoding service before, I know it's technically possible to do this but it sounds like a violation of the terms of service.
Are there other options for what we're trying to do?
Edit:
It turns out our company does have a license with Google to use the addresses that come back, and they will eventually be displayed on a Google Map to the end user, satisfying the terms of our agreement.
Short answer: You can't. The terms of service seem pretty clear-cut that geocoding using their API is not in line with their terms, unless you display them on a Google Map.
If you need this for other purposes, you should consider licensing a Geocoding library and dataset(s) for your regions of interest. There are quite a few companies which sell these for commercial purposes.
Update on this really old post:
#Cerin pointed out something important on this answer.
USPS Web Tools API are only free if you're using them to ship
via USPS
So be legal.
You are correct: you can't use the Google Geocoder for address cleaning.
You can use this wrapper to access USPS's Web Tools.
Another inexpensive solution is Semaphore, but you'll have to write your own wrapper class to call the DLLs.
The USPS has a free service to validate addresses. It's in a fairly easy-to-use API that you can curl information to and receive a valid response back. The only rub is that they're a little slow when it comes to registering, and they require you to run several tests before they'll open it up. Regardless, once you've jumped through the hoops, it does a great job. It's been keeping addresses in my app clean for quite a while now without any hiccups.
Web services and web APIs have managed to increase the accessibility of the information stored and catalogued on the internet. They have also opened up a vast array of enterprise power functionality for smaller thin client applications.
By taping into these services developers can provide functionality that would have taken them months perhaps years to set up. They can combine them into single applications that make life generally easier for its users.
Whether displaying information about the music being played, finding items of interest in the locale of the user or just simply tweeting and blogging from the same application - the possibilities are growing everyday.
I want to know about the most interesting or useful services that are out there, especially ones that most of us may not have heard about yet. Do you maintain an API or service? or do you have a clever mash up that provides even more benefits than the originals?
YQL - Yahoo provide a tool that lets you query many different API's across the web, even for sites that don't provide an API as such.
From the site:
The Yahoo! Query Language is an
expressive SQL-like language that lets
you query, filter, and join data
across Web services.
...
With YQL, developers can access and
shape data across the Internet through
one simple language, eliminating the
need to learn how to call different
APIs.
The World Bank API is pretty cool. Google uses it in search results. My favourite implementations are the cartograms at worldmapper.
(source: worldmapper.org)
It's very niche, but I happen to think the OpenCongress API is amazing.
Less niche: Google Translate has an API which will guess the language of something. You'd be AMAZED how frequently this comes in handy (even though it's not as tweakable as you'd like and is not trained on small samples).
I was just about to have a stab at using the SoundCloud API
I know many people who already use for sharing their musical masterpieces and its a pretty good site. Hopefully the api will be as well!
I like the RESTful API for weather.com. It's free and very useful for the new age of location-aware apps: https://registration.weather.com/ursa/xmloap/step1
It does require registration, but they don't spam you or anything - it's just to provide you a key to use the API.
Ah yes - here's another one I've been meaning to check out but haven't tried yet
The BBC offer a bunch of apis/feeds that look very promising
http://ideas.welcomebackstage.com/data
They include apis for accessing schedule data for both TV and Radio listings along with all kinds of news searches. It even looks like they'll be offering some sort of geo-location service soon so it will be interesting to see what that has to offer
Another interesting one for liberal brits! ;)
The Guardian news paper have their own api
http://www.guardian.co.uk/open-platform
MuiscBrainz
Excellent service for music mashups.
Not so many knows that Last.FM initial database was scraped from this service.
The United States Postal Service offers a web service that does address standardization. Quite useful in reducing clutter and cleaning data before it gets put into your database.
I'm aware of the WoW add-on programming community, but what I can find no documentation on is any API for accessing WoW's databases from the web. I see third-party sites like WoWHeroes.com and Wowhead use game data (item and character databases,) so I know it's possible. But, I can't figure out where to begin. Is there a web service I can use or are they doing some sort of under-the-hood work that requires running the WoW client in their server environment?
Sites like Wowhead and WoWHearoes use client run addons from players which collect data. The data is then posted to their website. There is no way to access WoW's database. Your best bet is to hit the armory and extract the XML returned from your searches. The armory is just an xml transform on xml data returned.
Blizzard has recently (8/15/2011) published draft documentation for their RESTful APIs at the following location:
http://blizzard.github.com/api-wow-docs/
The APIs cover information about characters, items, auctions, guilds, PVP, etc.
Requests to the API are currently throttled to 3,000 per day for anonymous usage, but there is a process for registering applications that have a legitimate need for more access.
Update (January 2019): The new Blizzard Battle.net Developer Portal is here:
https://develop.battle.net/
Request throttling limits and authentication rules have changed.
Characters can be mined from the armory, the pages are xml.
Items are mined from the local installation game files, that's how wowhead does it at least.
It's actually really easy to get item data from the wow armory!
For example:
http://www.wowarmory.com/item-info.xml?i=33135
View the source of the page (not via Google Chrome, which displays transformed XML via XSLT) and you'll see the XML data!
You can use search listing pages to retrieve all blue gems, for example, then use an XML parser to retrieve the data
They are parsing the Armory information from www.wowarmory.com. There is no official Blizzard API for accessing it, but there is an open source PHP solution available (http://phparmory.sourceforge.net/)
Maybe a little late to the party, but for future reference check out the WoW API Documentation at http://blizzard.github.com/api-wow-docs/
Scraping HTML and XML is now pretty much obsolete and also discouraged by Blizzard.
The documentation:
http://blizzard.github.com/api-wow-docs/
enjoy
Sites like those actually get the data from the Armory. If you pull up any item, guild, character, etc. and do 'View Source' on the page you will see the XML data coming back. Here is a quick C# example of how to get the data.
This third-party site collection data from players. I think this collection based on addons for WoW or each player submit information manualy.
Next option is wraping wow site and parsing information from websites (HTML).
this is probably the wrong site for your question, but you're thinking of the wowarmory xml stuff. there is no official wow api. people just do httprequests and get the xml to do number crunching stuffs. try googling around. there are some libs out there in different languages that are already written for you. i know there are implementations in php/ruby. i was working on one in .net a while back until i got distracted. here's an article which kinda sums this all up.
http://www.wow.com/2008/02/11/mashing-up-wow-data-when-we-can-get-it-in-outside-applications/
Wowhead and other sites generally rely on data gathered by users with a wow add-in.
Wowhead also has a way for other sites to reference that data in hover pop-ups, so their content gets reused on a number of sites.
Powered by Wowhead
For actual ingame data collection:
cosmos.exe is what thottbot for example uses. It probably uses some form windows hack (dllinjection or something) or sniffs packets to determine what items have dropped and etc. (intercepts traffic from the wow server to your client and decodes it). It saves this data on the users computer and then uploads it to a webserver for storage. I don't know if any development libraries were created for this sort of thing.