Developer API

Posted on July 26, 2017 by martin

This is a techie blog post, for the information of developers. If you're an ordinary user, you'll probably want to skip this post!

Cyclescape now has a fledgling developer API is now available.

Basically, this enables data in Cyclescape (public information - no personal data is involved) to be used in external systems, making it more useful.

Currently available API calls, as described in the documentation, are:

Issues - what problems exist, and when were they reported?
Groups - cycling groups around the country and their geographical areas
Tags - what are the themes of problems that people are talking about?

Here are the first two integrations, by way of example:

London Cycling Campaign's consultation map

London Cycling Campaign are using this to create a map of current consultations in London, thanks to work by Camden Cyclists.

You can create a similar map using the code for the map, which is open source.

Bikedata

CycleStreets (who run Cyclescape) has been working on a new website, Bikedata.

The Bikedata site aims to provide cycle campaigners around the UK with a ‘one-stop shop’ for data that helps them in their work. You can read more about the Bikedata site.

We've used the API to pass through reported issues on Cyclescape to Bikedata.

We've also added a layer showing all groups.

API documentation

Documentation of the API is available at:
https://www.cyclescape.org/api

Geographical data is GeoJSON, making it easy to add to a Leaflet or other map.

Usage policy

We don't currently have an API usage policy, but for now, we would expect users to adhere to standard principles:

Avoid excessive volumes of requests to the server;
Limit the geographical size to only what is needed;
Ensure you give attribution;
Link back to the site, rather than copying material which will then go out of date.

Future developments

We expect that more API calls will be added in future. Let us know if you have any particular requests for the API.

This work has been possible kindly thanks to grant support from the Polden-Puckham Charitable Foundation. Thanks also to Nikolai and other contributors who have made these improvements possible.

Cycle campaign toolkit: introducing our developer team

Posted on September 23, 2011 by martin

Progress on our cycle campaigner toolkit is steaming (pedalling?) ahead! Coding work began on Monday, and will continue solidly for the next few months.

The development of the toolkit has been possible thanks to our GeoVation award, which secured us £27,000 of funding. GeoVation is an Ordnance Survey initiative and forms part of the Ideas in Transit project with funding from the Technology Strategy Board and the Department for Transport.

We're pleased to introduce our developer team, Andy Allan, Andrew France, plus myself (Martin Lucas-Smith) from CycleStreets as project manager. Andy and Andrew will be working in it on solidly for the next few months so that a large amount of development can be done.

We're also approaching various designers and design companies for the work on the design and information architecture aspects of the project.

	Andy Allan is a freelance developer and cartographer, specialising in all things related to OpenStreetMap. He is the creator of opencyclemap.org, the award-winning map for cyclists used by hundreds of websites and mobile applications, along with his recently developed transport map. He has helped develop the technology that powers OpenStreetMap including the online editor, Potlatch2, and is a member of the OSMF Operations Working Group. Andy lives and works in London but prefers cycling elsewhere.
	Andrew France is an experienced web application developer specialising in Ruby on Rails. A generalist by nature, he is just as happy designing intuitive front-end interfaces and writing JavaScript as he is constructing database schema. Andrew has worked on a variety of systems from charity sites to hazardous chemicals management and always looks forward to implementing new ideas. He is a keen traveller, cyclist, runner, and imbiber of ale.
	Martin Lucas-Smith is one of the two lead developers of CycleStreets. He'll be project-managing the toolkit project and getting involved in the Rails coding in the latter half of the project. For CycleStreets, Martin tends to deal with non-routing code and structure of the CycleStreets codebase; he also deals with most of the CycleStreets project management so that fellow developer Simon can concentrate on the complex routing work. Martin's actual job is as a Web Developer at the Department of Geography , University of Cambridge.

Get involved in an exciting open source project!

The toolkit is to be developed as an open source project, with the code on Github. It will be written using the technologies of Ruby on Rails (v3.1), PostgreSQL, and jQuery.

Volunteers are needed to contribute to the code from the end of October. If you'd be interested, do let us know.

We're aiming to build a project team who will develop and look after the system from December onwards. By that stage, the grant-funded development work will mean that the system is already fully-featured and well coded so should be in a good state to add functionality to.

Timeline

We'll have:

Screenshots of our 'alpha' available by 21^st October.
A beta available to a few campaign groups around Christmas. If your group would like to be a 'guinea-pig', do let us know! We'll start to open it up to more groups in the month following.
General availability of the site after a period of bugfixing, scaling and iteration.

Stay tuned to this blog and our Twitter feed for updates.

We're also seeking an additional grant of around £10k to enable us to undertake solid coding on some of the more advanced features that groups have suggested, particularly do deal with more complex issues like cross-group sharing, which will increase the utility of the system considerably.