A Day in the Life aims to provide a personal connection with the archives and statistical data.
Summary
Over 100 years of data, information and imagery has been captured in the many datasets available for GovHack, but how does the average person connect with this? Do they care what the rainfall was on the 1st March 1965? Do you want to browse photos from 60 years ago? Maybe, maybe not. However, every person has a nostalgic interest in the events around the time of their birth, their families births, their friends births – how has the world changed? Was I born on a rainy day? How much did bread cost back then? Why did people wear such ‘funny’ clothes?
A Day in the Life aims to take as many datasets as possible that invoke nostalgia and interest. Simply enter a date and a location and you will see a point in time snapshot of what the world looked like then. Photos from the period are selected from the National Archives, population and currency information is provided by the Australian Bureau of Statistics specific to the location selected and rainfall and temperature is displayed from the Bureau of Meteorology.
To provide that extra connection to the past datasources from dbpedia have been consumed to provide information on historic events.
Connect with your past and get started here: A Day in the Life
Approach
- The National Archives image metadata as well as historical datasets for temperature and rainfall from BOM and population and price index from ABS were processed and loaded into MongoDB.
- SPARQL queries were developed to extract additional relevant linked data information from dbpedia to supplement the existing datasets.
- A web application providing REST-based APIs was developed to support querying and retrieving data from the datasets.
- A tablet-friendly Web UI was developed on top of the REST API to present the information.
API
In order to consume the several datasets that are used an API was required. Firstly the datasets converted to JSON and loaded into a flexible MongoDB database. This allowed easy access to the data using a REST API and ensure that minimal processing is carried out on each request whilst keeping the response simple and easily consumable by other programs. Sat between MongoDB and the rest of the world is a Java Servlet acting as our API layer, this receives the incoming requests, queries the MongoDB database or dbpedia and provides results as JSON or single values. Please see below for the API reference.
Future work
- Queries were developed using the Trove newspapers API and Billboard Music Charts API to display news stories and popular music of the time, however we were not able to finish integrating these into the application during the timeframe of govhack.
- The performance of the app could be improved by caching results and data from external sources.
- Clicking images will link to newspaper articles based on the keywords in the description of the photo
Development Technologies
- MongoDB
- SPARQL
- HTML5
- jQuery & JSON
- REST API (see below)
- Java Servlets
- Apache Tomcat
- Virtual Machine with Ubuntu provided by ninefold
Open Source
All frontend, backend and CSV-to-JSON data migration tools written for GovHack 2012 are available free under an MIT license on github by clicking here.
API Reference
The APIs made available are: (click the URLs for examples)
| Dataset | URL | URL Parameters | Result |
| National Archives – PhotoSearch | http://202.2.94.231:8080/ADITL/Photosearch | date (in the format YYYY-MM-DD) keyword(optional) |
application/json (list of all matching photos) |
| BOM – Temperature Data | http://202.2.94.231:8080/ADITL/Temperature | date (in the format YYYY-MM-DD) state (one of: NSW, VIC, QLD, SW, WA, TAS, NT, ACT) minormax (one of: min or max indicating if you want the maximum or minimum temperature for this day.) |
text/plain Decimal |
| Rainfall | http://202.2.94.231:8080/ADITL/Rainfall | date (in the format YYYY-MM-DD) state(one of: NSW, VIC, QLD, SW, WA, TAS, NT, ACT) |
text/plain Decimal |
| ABS – Population for States and Territories | http://202.2.94.231:8080/ADITL/Population | date (in the format YYYY-MM-DD) state (one of: NSW, VIC, QLD, SW, WA, TAS, NT, ACT, or AUS for all of Australia) |
text/plain Integer |
| ABS – Consumer Price Index | http://202.2.94.231:8080/ADITL/CPI | date (in the format YYYY-MM-DD) state (one of: NSW, VIC, QLD, SW, WA, TAS, NT, ACT, or AUS for all of Australia) |
text/plain Decimal (as a percentage of the current CPI i.e. 0.1 = 10% of current CPI) |
| ABS – Prime Ministers | http://202.2.94.231:8080/ADITL/PrimeMinister | date (in the format YYYY-MM-DD) | application/json |
| dbpedia – Local and Time Specific Events | http://202.2.94.231:8080/ADITL/Events | date (in the format YYYY-MM-DD) city |
application/json |
Peter Dallimore
Hey guys,
Fantastic work over the weekend. Just to let you know access to the Ninefold services provisioned for you during Govhack will be yours to continue working on your project for the next 6 months. Please keep us up to date with your projects so we can keep the buzz going.
Regards,
Pete
Ninefold
Mike Leonard
Thats great! Thank you, and thanks for your support over the weekend.
Anna Gerber
This app is now running at http://butterflyproject.info/ADITL/