Accessing Canada's Open Data through APIs Welcome to the Visualizing Stats Canada Data using Tableau workshop! My name is Lucia Costanzo and I assist students, staff and faculty at the University of Guelph with analyzing data for over 15 years. As a part of data analysis, data visualizations are used to communicate results and observations clearly and efficiently. This is done through the use of charts and graphs. Through my consultations, researchers almost always visualize their data using bar charts, pie charts, maps and other types of plots and charts. These researchers find it easier for audiences to process and interpret large amounts of data through the use of these visualization than over spreadsheets or reports. Data visualizations are a quick, easy way to convey concepts They also allow for tweaks here and there to test out a few different scenarios. Lucia Costanzo MA, MSc, MLIS

Learning Objectives Getting Comfortable with APIs by: Understanding how APIs work Learn how APIs are used Gain experience using APIs Gears and Stickpeople: https://www.hrvoice.org/putting-diversity-to-work/coloured-gears/

What is an API? Application Program Interface “A set of functions and procedures that allow the creation of applications which access the features or data of an operating system, application, or service.” Oxford English Dictionary

What is an API?

What are the Benefits? Efficiency: data easily shared and distributed to various data consumers Wider Reach: use and reuse of data globally Automation: data collection and cost reduction Leverage Gov’t Data: available to wider audience Integration: interact directly with current data source https://api-all-the-x.18f.gov/pages/benefits_of_apis/ Check Mark Button: http://www.clker.com/cliparts/l/n/a/E/b/t/check-mark-button-hi.png

What are the Disadvantages? Costly: expensive in terms of development time, maintaining API documentation and providing support to users of to implement API Security exposure: Adding an API adds another level of vulnerability to your website

What are APIs used for? WorldCat is union catalog that itemizes the collections of 72,000 libraries in 170 countries and territories. APIs are used to: Search (to retrieve information about bibliographic holdings) Metadata (to retrieve and update bibliographic records) Primo API from ExLibris The main API method is making calls to retrieve information from Primo.

Who uses APIs? Open Canada Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) API PLoS Article-Level Metrics API Open American Chemical Society Text Mining Europeana APIs HathiTrust Data API PLoS Search API ScienceDirect APIs IEEE Xplore API arXiv API Scopus APIs JSTOR Data for Research SAO/NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS) API Springer APIs Library of Congress APIs STAT!Ref OpenSearch API BioMed Central API Nature Blogs API Web of Science Web Services CORE API Nature OpenSearch API CrossRef REST API World Bank APIs DVN (Dataverse Network) APIs for Data Sharing NLM APIs UN Comtrade APIs OECD Data APIs Wiley Text and Data Mining ORCID API

What are Web APIs? Web API Interface with URLs You send a request through the URL Server sends back content through response Types of Web APIs: SOAP - Simple Object Access Protocol REST or RESTful – Representational State Transfer RPC – Remote Procedure Call (Canada Open Data) Popular Tag: https://www.insurancejournal.com/app/uploads/2014/12/most-popular-sign-580x580.jpg

Common HTTP Verbs Indicate desired action to be performed for a given resource: GET: Retrieve resource (most utilized) PUT: Create new resource POST: Update existing resource or create new resource DELETE: Remove resource Canada Open Data only allows for GET actions

APIs: The Basics URLs (the address of a World Wide Web page) can be used to make a “request” (API request or API call) URLs have parameters (similar to variables) Parameters specify things like: How many results do you want back at once? How do you want the results to be sorted? What date range do you want to search? What location do you want to search? What format do you want the results in? https://schoolofdata.org/2013/11/18/web-apis-for-non-programmers/

Let’s get started! Computer Keyboard: https://blog.designveloper.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Programming-languages-for-beginner6.jpg

API Tools JSON Readers Open Data Canada CKAN API Documentation Chrome Extension: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/json-viewer/gbmdgpbipfallnflgajpaliibnhdgobh Online JSON Viewer: http://jsonviewer.stack.hu/ Open Data Canada http://open.canada.ca/en/open-data CKAN API Documentation http://docs.ckan.org/en/latest/api/ Built-in Pivot Feature in Tableau It is a built in pivoting tool that converts data with a lot of columns into data that has fewer columns and many rows. That is, it normalizes the data. Downside is that it only works with Excel and CSV files. As well, it is best to use with datasets with not too many questions. Add-in for Microsoft Excel by Tableau This free tool is another way to normalize the data. Again it can only be used with Excel and CSV files. Also, it is not available for the MAC. Qualtrics Web Data Connector It allows you connect directly to Qualtrics survey using Tableau. I haven’t really used so I can’t comment on the performance.

Thank You