Pezholio » Council Stuff

Generating QR codes using PHP and the Goo.gl API

Pez — Mon, 25 Jul 2011 13:33:48 +0000

QR codes are all the rage at the mo, after a bit of a slow start, they’re popping up everywhere, even appearing in cookery programmes.

I’ve decided to take advantage of this, and have started a project to get QR codes on planning notices, so if someone is out and about and they see a planning notice attached to a lampost, they can scan the code with their phone and immediately find out more about the application.

I’ve still not finished this, but the first hurdle was actually generating the QR codes themselves. There are plenty of APIs out there, but, the more information you put in a QR code, the more complex it is, making it more difficult it is to scan and more prone to errors.

What I really wanted to do was shorten a URL and then create a QR code from that. If this is going to be automated, I’d need a little script to do the legwork for me.

I chose Google’s goo.gl url shortener, as it provides an easy option for creating a QR code, just by putting .qr at the end. Here’s the code, with comments along the way:

// We're going to be outputting this as an image, rather than as plaintext, to make it easier to include in, for example a webpage header("Content-Type: image/png");


// We put the long URL in an array, as we're going to encode our data as JSON for the Goo.gl API

$request = array(

	'longUrl' => $_GET['url']

);
// As we need to POST the data, we're using cURL

$ch = curl_init(); 
// This tells cURL to output the result of the request

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
// This is the URL of the Goo.gl API

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, "https://www.googleapis.com/urlshortener/v1/url"); 
// We're setting the content type of our request as JSON

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, Array("Content-Type: application/json"));
// It's a POST request

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, true);
// And here is the contents of the request we set earlier, encoded as JSON

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, json_encode($request));
// Now we're getting our data, again, as per the request, it's JSON, so we're using json_decode() to convert to JSON to a PHP object

$data = json_decode(curl_exec($ch));
// Closing the cURL request

curl_close($ch);
/*

The response is in this format:
{

 "kind": "urlshortener#url",

 "id": "http://goo.gl/fbsS",

 "longUrl": "http://www.google.com/"

}
and it's 'id' we're intested so:

*/

$shorturl = $data->id;
// We now add .qr to the end of the URL and get the raw contents of the resulting QR code

$image = file_get_contents($shorturl.".qr");

// Now echo the result out! As we've set the header of the document to be a PNG image, the browser (or whatever) knows to display an image, rather than a meaningless string of characters echo $image;

And there you have it! Any questions, give me a yell in the comments. Next step is getting the codes on the notices, which I’m nearly there with – will let you know how I get on.

Using Foursquare in Local Government

Pez — Mon, 21 Feb 2011 13:56:25 +0000

Foursquare. It’s just a vanity publishing tool that takes over your Twitter stream and Facebook feed right? OK, I’m as guilty as the next Foursquare user for checking in to the pub at lunchtime and telling all my Twitter followers, but Foursquare can actually be a pretty useful tool for giving visitors and residents useful information about their surroundings.

As well as being able to check into places and see where your friends are, Foursquare also allows you to leave ‘tips’ about venues for your friends and followers, so when they check into that venue (or one nearby), they’ll see this tip. I’ve left a couple of tips on my personal Foursquare account (mainly plugging nights I play at, or calling out bad service at restaurants), but I’ve always thought Foursquare tips could be really useful for our tourism team, highlighting special offers and also giving historical titbits of information about places in the district.

I never really knew how to get started with a Foursquare page until I read Joseph Stashko’s post on how he added a Foursquare page for Blog Preston. I’ll leave you to read Joseph’s explanation on how he got set up, but needless to say, the sign up process is a little bit convoluted (To be fair, Foursquare say they will be changing this soon).

That said, once I’d filled everything out, got our designer to design a header and sent it all off to Foursquare, I was up and running within a few hours (together with a nice personal response from a Foursquare staffer).

You can now see the results on the Visit Lichfield Foursquare page. I’ve added a few tips in and around Lichfield City with historical information that I know about personally, together with a few special offers, and I’m looking at getting a few more tips added after talking to our Green Badge guides (who know much more about Lichfield’s history than me) before launching the page officially (bizarrely, we already seem to have 600+ followers without doing any promotion, mainly people from Indonesia and New York).

However, it’s not just tourism that Foursquare can help with, I’d love to develop something like donteat.at, which uses public data on food safety inspections in New York to warn you if you’re about to eat at a place with a poor hygiene report, and if you’re a council with a lot of venues, you could leave tips about upcoming events or special offers. The only limit, as they say, is your imagination!

If anyone else has any useful tips on local gov using Foursquare, I’d love to hear them – drop me a line in the comments.

Spending data – beyond the CSV

Pez — Fri, 14 Jan 2011 10:00:51 +0000

It’s been a while since my last post about local spending data, and, since then, our finance team have been busy beavering away behind the scenes to get our own spending data out of the council’s finance systems.

However, from the outset, I was really pleased that both our finance people and our chief exec wanted to go beyond just whacking a CSV (or worse, a PDF) on the internet and show our commitment to transparency by putting the data on the web in an easy, human readable format.

Armed with a few CSVs, a Macbook Pro and some server space, I was put to task, and the the results can be seen here. Users can navigate by the various parts of the cost code (called “Department”, “Type” and “Subject”), as well as by month and supplier.

As well as human readable formats, almost every view of the data has an XML, JSON, CSV and RDF equivalent, achieved either by putting the relevant extension on the end, or through content negotiation.

The user interface had been heavily influenced by OpenlyLocal (after all, if it ain’t broke, why fix it?) and, as well as feeding our data in to OpenlyLocal, we also take a little bit away. When data is imported into OpenlyLocal, the system does some clever data matching to match company names to real life entities on Open Corporates. We have a batch job that takes that information and puts it on our spending system – you can see an example here. This is an example of how open data cuts both ways, by sharing our data, we can improve it.

Also, thanks to the wonderful people at Talis, we have our RDF data in a triple store, so it can be queried, both through SPARQL queries and a free text search, making the data even more useful from the off. I’m hoping to put together a tutorial in SPARQL soon, both here and on the Lichfield District Council website, which should hopefully demystify the process a bit more.

Finally, I’m hoping to open source the code (once it’s tidied up a bit), so of you’re from a local authority and want to make your spending data a little more clear to Joe Public, then you can benefit from my work too!

Grit bins – your help needed!

Pez — Fri, 12 Nov 2010 10:28:36 +0000

During the Lichfield Hacks and Hackers day yesterday (bigger blog post to come on that later) – I was gifted a list of grit bins in Lichfield District, I got very excited about this, but my excitement was quickly dampened when I realised that there was no geographical data in the list, just road names and a vague location.

However, I then thought ‘not to worry, I can just ask people who live nearby to geolocate them on their phones and add them to a Google Doc’, I asked a @robthedog (who lives in a village north of the district) if he could do a few when he got home, his reply was ‘I can do one now’:

Of course! Google Street view! This is where you lot come in. I’m going to crowdsource the location of these grit bins (I’ve already done a few myself) – to help, all you need to do is follow a few simple steps:

Open up this Google document
Drag this bookmarklet to your browser’s toolbar
Open up Google Maps and search for a road name and town / village which doesn’t have a lat/lng yet
Drag the little yellow street view man (this guy) to the map and have a look round Street View for the grit bin
Once you’re right by it – zoom out of Street View and click the bookmarklet – a window will pop up with the lat/lng – you can then copy and paste it and enter it into the Google doc!

It’s that simple! If you could do just a couple, I’ll be forever in your debt (I might buy you a pint if I see you in the flesh too!)

Once it’s done, I’ll be able to build a handy map of grit bins in the area and hopefully save a few slips and falls (as well as a few costly calls to our contact centre!). There’s 87of them, and, as I’ve already done 10, it should be long before I’ve got them all.

Thanks again, you lovely people you!

First steps to councils publishing their own linked data

Pez — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 11:17:33 +0000

On Friday, I toddled along to London for a bit of a chat about local spending data, organised by LeGSB, the local government e-Standards body. In particular we looked at how councils can publish their spending data in a linked data format. It was an interesting day, and much of the work seems to have already been done by folks much cleverer than myself.

However, at the end of the day, Paul Davidson (the Director of Standards at LeGSB) raised an interesting topic. At the moment, much of the describing of councils in the linked data world seems to be done by external bodies, such as The Office for National Statistics and Ordnance Survey, and often, this isn’t always the best fit, with the data referring to geographical regions, rather than councils themselves.

Paul then made the point that really, it should be the councils themselves that describe who they are, rather than some arbitrary body, after all, there is no one better placed to know about the council than the council themselves! We then talked very briefly about the possibility of councils minting their own URIs and publishing some RDF with some information about themselves (such as contact details etc). Other organisations and people can then use these URIs to refer to the councils in their data.

I’ve been mulling this over over the weekend, and I fired off an email this morning suggesting that, rather than publishing a page of RDF, people simply add data to their council homepages, either as RDFa or metadata (although I’m not sure how you’d do the latter!). People could then use their council homepage URLs as URIs (perhaps with #id at the end of the URI, to make the URI for the council different to the one for the page).

With this in mind I’ve knocked up a sample dataset for Lichfield District Council using various ontologies from around the linked data web (including FOAF, vCard, Chris Taggart’s Openly Local ontology and a bit of the Organizational (sic) Ontology). I’ve also sameAsed to the National Statistics Dataset, Openly Local and DBpedia:

xmlns:skos="http://www.w3.org/2004/02/skos/core#" xmlns:rdfs="http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#" xmlns:owl="http://www.w3.org/2002/07/owl#" xmlns:foaf="http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/" xmlns:dct="http://purl.org/dc/terms/" xmlns:vcard="http://www.w3.org/2006/vcard/ns#" xmlns:administrative-geography="http://statistics.data.gov.uk/def/administrative-geography/" xmlns:openlylocal="http://openlylocal.com/info/vocab#" xmlns:org="http://www.w3.org/ns/org#"> Lichfield District Council Lichfield District Council 41UD mailto:enquiries@lichfielddc.gov.uk Lichfield_DC Lichfield District Council District Council House, Frog Lane, Lichfield WS13 6YY England

It’s not perfect, but it’s a start, there’s 24 triples there and I’m sure there could be more. Only problem is, I’m not a linked data expert, so I’m looking for a bit of feedback both on what I’ve done, but also what I could add – For example, I could add the chief executive and leader of the council – but I’m not sure how I’d do it!

Feedback from non-linked data experts is welcome too – especially those at the coal face of local gov – if there was a step by step guide to doing this, could you do it? (i.e. have you got access to add metadata to your homepage) and, more importantly, would you do it?

UPDATE I’ve now published the final(ish) version at http://www.lichfielddc.gov.uk/lichfield.rdf, with a rel=’alternate’ meta link on the Lichfield homepage. I’ve also reused the reference.data.gov.uk ontology to show the councils CEO, leader etc, together with a bit of FOAF for their contact details.

Thanks to Jeni Tennison, Leigh Dodds and Dave Reynolds for helping me to get this far, and hopefully we can encourage more councils to do the same!

A Local Spending Data Brain Splurge

Pez — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 13:40:49 +0000

Today I was at a ‘quick and dirty’ local spending data workshop at Birmingham City Council’s newly refurbished offices on Lancaster Circus. There’ll be more detailed info to come on the Local Open Data Community (login required), but I just wanted to blog a few of my thoughts post the meeting.

There was a lot of talk about what other councils have done (such as Windsor and Maidenhead, Barnet, Islington etc), and it was agreed that there was a lot of difference in how the data was presented, Paul Davidson also talked about some of the work that the Local eGovernment Standards Body had done regarding getting spending data out there in a linked data format. There did seem to be a bit of resistance to the linked data approach, mainly because agreeing standards seems to be a long, drawn out process, which is counter to the JFDI approach of publishing local data.

However, while I am a fan of the possibilities of linked data, I also recognise that there are difficulties in both publishing the data and also working with it. For example, I think it’s unrealistic to expect every local authority to maintain a triple store to publish their spending data. As we learned from the local elections project, often local authorities don’t even have people who are competent in HTML, let alone RDF, SPARQL etc.

Therefore, I think the way forward is a centralised approach, with authorities publishing CSVs in a standard format on their website and some kind of system picking up these CSVs (say, on a monthly basis) and converting this data to a linked data format (as well as publishing in vanilla XML, JSON and CSV format).

The great thing about the linked data approach is it will mean that each item of spending can have its own URI – e.g.

http://localspending.data.gov.uk/41UD/12345

(The first part of the URI would be the SNAC code for the authority, and then the second part of the URI would be the internal reference number)

As well as having a human-readable summary of the data (together with links to the actual data in RDF, XML, CSV and JSON), there would be a comments box (similar to Adrian Short’s fantastic Armchair Auditor), as well as the ability to ask any questions about an item of expenditure – the answers to these questions would then be automatically published next to the item of spend (hopefully helping to cut down on multiple FOI requests).

While this may be a bit of a pie in the sky idea, I do feel that there does need to be some kind of effort on the part of central government to help move this project along, as we’ve seen already (naming no names!) some authorities have got it drastically wrong, and while there is definitely mileage in the ‘just get it out there’ approach, I think if we’re going to end up with something *really* useful (for both members of the public and local authorities), we need to get the data in one place.

Thoughts?

An iPhone app in 5 days?

Pez — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 12:13:55 +0000

iPhones are ace aren’t they? Despite howls of derision from some camps, in the space of a few years, it’s completely turned the mobile world on its head.

I’ve wanted to build an iPhone app for Ratemyplace – the food safety ratings website I run at the council on behalf of 8 other councils in Staffordshire for a while, but unfortunately just didn’t have time to learn Objective-C, the language that iPhone apps are built in – at the same time, I’m also aware that not everyone has an iPhone, so have been scouting around for ways to build apps that can be ported to other platforms quickly and easily.

About 6 months ago, I looked at Phonegap, which promised to allow me to build apps quickly using only HTML and Javascript. I beavered away for a few weeks, and finally had an app I was (sort of) pleased with. It used native features such as geolocation, and I used the UiUi Kit CSS library to make the app look as much like a native app as possible. I was all ready to submit it to the app store. Then the 3.0 firmware upgrade came.

My iPhone app was busted – native geolocation no longer worked, and a little hack I’d worked out to get a toolbar at the bottom and a navbar at the top was also kaputt. I tried to fix it for a bit, but other priorities took over, and the project went on hold.

Then, a few weeks ago, I came across Appcelerator Titanium, a platform that does pretty much everything Phonegap does, but (in my opinion) much better. While Phonegap uses a portion of the iPhone’s API called the webview to display webpages as though they were native apps, Titanium goes one better, it compiles your code into a mixture of web views and native Objective-C code. Like Phonegap, it also works with Android, and a promise of more platforms to come.

This means that you can not only take advantage of many more native iPhone features, your app is much less likely to be rejected (as a lot of phonegap apps were) because of the use of what Apple calls ‘private APIs’.

I dusted down my old bits of code, bookmarked the API documentation, and set to work. In the end, as well as doing my other duties, the app took me 5 days (and one beery evening) to complete. You can see a few screenshots below:

I submitted it to Apple yesterday, and I’m not expecting to hear anything for a good few weeks, if not months (Apple’s approvals processes to get an app into the app store are notoriously strict) but I’m reasonably hopeful. I’m now looking at porting my code to Android phones, with a view to looking at Blackberry and Nokia devices too.

Looking forward a few years, with the growing adoption by mobile phone browsers of HTML5 and CSS3, I can see that apps are going to become more browser based, and (hopefully), this will lead to standards being adopted across the industry, but, until then, it seems that platforms like Titanium are going to be the best way to get your apps to as many people as quickly as possible.

Fixmytweet!

Pez — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 12:24:07 +0000

I love Fixmystreet – it’s the nearest thing we’ve got to a national problem reporting hub, while other council website bury their reporting facilities under pages and pages of navigation, Fixmystreet is simple, quick and direct.

What I also love is its openness, as well as being able to pull out reports for problems in your area, you can also inject problem reports directly into the system, meaning anyone can build their own front end for the system.

I’ve been thinking about Fixmystreet a lot recently, after building my own frontend for it via the Ubermap, I’ve also been thinking about repurposing our existing streetscene reporting forms, and getting them to use Fixmystreet.

It was while fiddling about under the hood, that I thought ‘wouldn’t it be cool if people could report problems via Twitter?’

Twitter is a fast way of communicating, and crucially, it’s mobile. There’s a plethora of mobile apps and frontends for Twitter, and even if you’re only on an aged Nokia 3310, you can send tweets by text message. This means that when you spot a problem, you can report it straight away. You could even add a picture.

I got cracking on it, and, within the space of 24 hours I had a prototype – users sign up with their Twitter username and email address on the Fixmytweet website, and whenever they spot a problem, they can send a tweet in this format:

@fixmytweet {postcode} {description of problem} {twitpic link (optional)}

(If you’ve got a smartphone with a Twitter app that supports the geolocation API you don’t even need the postcode!)

The system then parses the tweet and sends the necessaries to Fixmystreet. Fixmystreet then sends an email to the user, with a link for them to add more detail and approve the report. It then gets sent directly to the council! (and, if the council is smart, they can even integrate it with their CRM system)

I’m currently testing this out on a test version of Fixmystreet, and it seems to be working well so far. If you’re interested in helping test me test it, please sign up on the Fixmytweet website and send a test tweet.

I’ll keep everyone posted on developments on Twitter and this here blog!

Twitter – to RSS or not RSS?

Pez — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 16:55:00 +0000

It’s been a while since I first published my Beginners’ Guide to Twitter in Local Government, and since then (although, obviously not as a direct result of my blog post!) there’s been a plethora of local authorities using Twitter.

However, with a few notable exceptions, most councils seem to prefer the ‘fire and forget’ method of sticking an RSS feed into Twitterfeed and leaving it to run. Hell, even I was guilty of it up until recently – even though I was making an effort to monitor and engage, I was still letting the news articles automatically publish via Twitterfeed.

There’s been a bit of a discussion recently via Twitter as to the rights and wrongs of this, and I’m definitely in the ‘wrong’ camp now – A few months ago I turned off the RSS feed for @lichfield_dc press releases and now do them manually. Why? Well, I shall tell you…

You don’t talk to a robot

Twitter is, by and large, a social medium – if all you’re doing is chucking out press releases, people will assume you’re not interested in engaging or are just going to generate boring content. This means you aren’t going to get followed by as many people who might otherwise be interested in you.

Auto tweets look ugly

Take this press release for example. If I were to use an auto tweeter, here’s what it would look like:

News: Everyone is invited to get into the festive spirit at this year’s Christmas Fayre taking place in the city… http://is.gd/5eZUT

Pretty boring huh? Plus the content gets cut short and can often not make sense. However, if I conjour up a manual tweet, I can tailor it much more to the Twitter medium and come up with something a lot more friendly:

This means you can get your message across much more easily and in a style that fits in with Twitter’s informal approach.

Stopping information overload

Sometimes you’ll have a press release which, while it might be relevant for the website, might not be suitbale for Twitter. If you’re blindly tweeting everything you put out, then people might be much more likely to be turned off by your content and reach for that big button marked ‘unfollow’.

This is all well and good, but…

…I can hear the objections already – ‘I don’t have time to write manual tweets’ – but how difficult it it to write a 140 character tweet? If you’re going to take online engagement seriously, it’s definitely worth just taking 2 minutes to show your followers you care.

If you really must use automated tweets, then make sure you mark your account up as such – call it something like ‘councilx_news’ and state very clearly that all you’re doing is publishing the latest news – then if further down the line you decide to engage a bit more, you can start another account for more human interaction.

I’m a massive hypocrite

However, after saying all this, I do agree that sometimes, automated tweets have their place. We do still tweet food safety inspections, and @ldcplanning has been happily tweeting planning applications for a while now. However, it’s not really practical to tweet large volume, samey tweets manually, and you don’t get the same advantages with tweeting press releases.

In fact, I recently did a straw poll amongst our followers about whether to get rid of the food safety tweets, especially as much of the content is replicated by @ratemyplace, but the majority seemed to like them. So maybe automated tweets isn’t as open and shut a case as I’d like it to be?

Simple(ish) routes to local authority open data?

Pez — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 12:17:13 +0000

Now, I’ve been banging on about local government open data for a while, I’ve been opening up various datasets on the Lichfield District Council website and generally evangelising to anyone who will listen (and even to some who won’t!)

This JFDI publish-everything-you’ve-got-in-a-database-just-because-you-can approach is all well and good if you’re a techy like me, but there’s three wee problemettes:

Problemette Number 1 You need to be a techy to get the data out there – a lot of local authorities don’t have the technical resource to do this stuff.
Problemette Number 2 It’s not sustainable – If I die (God fobid!) or leave the authority – whoever takes on my role might not have the skills or time to keep up my work.
Problemette Number 3 It’s not in a standard format – generally I’ve been making up XML schemas, or releasing in RSS or KML – which, while useful for local developers, doesn’t work semantically.

These issues have been playing on my mind for a while now, especially with central government releasing a whole load of data on data.gov.uk – how can we local authorities, a disperate band of organisations spread across the country with different teams and different ways of doing things do something similar, particularly with the problemettes above in mind?

It was with this running through my head that I chanced up on the Central Office of Information’s guidance on structuring information on the web for reusability – this sets out how organisations (particularly central government) can edit their HTML pages using RDFa – a markup that allows information to be ‘sucked out’ of web pages and re purposed as RDF data. A robot can then ‘see’ the pages and republish them on a different site (in this case DirectGov).

Although this is still reasonably technical, anyone with a basic knowledge of HTML should be able to edit their templates and expose this data, much easier than slaving over SQL databases and messing around with XML. Suppliers could also easily modify their systems to add RDFa markup (although, suppliers being suppliers, they’ll probably charge an exorbitant fee for this work!).

At Lichfield, we’re currently putting together a consultation system, and, following the directions on the COI site, I managed to mark up our consultations in RDFa, and, other than a few issues with validation, I managed it pretty quickly – here’s the RDF in all it’s glory (you’ll need to view the source to see it properly).

The COI are asking central government departments to implement this new format for all their consultations from 1 January 2010, which is no mean feat, but I’d like to see a similar dictact (albeit one with a slightly more realistic timeline!) come for local authorities too – we did it with IPSV, so why can’t we do this too?