If There’s Something Strange In Your Neighbourhood...Who You Gonna Call? APIs!

The engaged public has more ways to communicate to their government when action needs to be taken, especially in the form of service requests, aka 311 calls. However, allowing the public to monitor requests in near real-time can be difficult. Third party services are providing data ingress and egress options for this data through APIs, limiting access to the paying organization. FME’s HTTPCaller allows this data to be served up to the world simply by constructing the correct text strings. The City of Chattanooga, TN and data-as-a-service provider Socrata developed a FME workspace to pull the City’s 311 data through the PublicStuff API and push it into their cloud data platform.