1. 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

2. Learning Objectives Getting Comfortable with APIs by:
Understanding how APIs work
Learn how APIs are used
Gain experience using APIs
Gears and Stickpeople:

3. 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

4. What is an API?

5. 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
Check Mark Button:

6. 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

7. 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.

8. 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

9. 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:

10. 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

11. 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?

12. Let’s get started!
Computer Keyboard:

13. API Tools JSON Readers Open Data Canada CKAN API Documentation
Chrome Extension:
Online JSON Viewer:
Open Data Canada
CKAN API Documentation
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.

14. Thank You