EduGlu Sandbox

Last week, a call went out for government data mashup ideas, along with a list of government data APIS: Show Us a Better Way.

i signed up for some of the API keys (though I still haven't received an NHS data API key :-(, and had a little tinker over the weekend just trying to get my head around some of them. While I've nothing to show yet (and no real ideas other than a search tool for the NHS service) I do expect to cobble together a set of 'minimally working' tools that act essentially as "Hello World" elaborations around the often scant documentation.

So here for starters is a reworking of the supplied National Statistics API AJAX demo, that demonstrates the use of the discovery service API (as described in the NeSS Data Exchange User Guide v0.2) for three different discovery queries (GetLevelTypes, GetLevelTypesByHierarchy and GetSubjectTree): National Statistics API - Discovery services AJAX demos.

The API is a SOAP service (as you'd expect), which means processing the results XML file with a small XSL transformation. As I was following the "Hello World" call, I transformed the results to an HTML table. If I get a chance, I'll try to put together a couple of XSLTs to JSON, and show how to actually get a handle on the data in the web page itself...

PS is there an official "showusabetterway" tag?

Tags: NationalStatistics API, showusabetterway