API and UI for accessing the decision-making material of the City of Helsinki. The backend is RESTful and based on Django and Tastypie. The HTML5 frontend utilizes the REST API and is written mostly in CoffeeScript.
The City of Helsinki has decided to open the data related to decision making inside the city. In the first phase, the focus is on political decision makers, e.g. committees, the city board and the city council. During the second phase (to be completed in 2013), data from all non-political civil servant decision makers will be opened, as well.
The original data is provided in zipped XML format. The data is available from the OpenAhjo web server. The ZIP files are in subdirectories based on the committee name and ID. The ZIP file includes also other types of files such as the attachment documents (mostly PDF) to the agenda items.
This project automatically scans through the original repository periodically, imports the XML, cleans it up and augments the data with other information such as geospatial geometries. It then serves the content in linked data format over a REST API.
The API specification is automatically generated by django-tastypie-swagger. A live version lives at http://dev.hel.fi/openahjo/doc.
The API is composed of the resources described below.
An entity making decisions. For example:
http://dev.hel.fi/openahjo/v1/policymaker/1/?format=json
{
"id": 1,
"name": "Tarkastuslautakunta",
"origin_id": "00311",
"resource_uri": "/openahjo/v1/committee/1/"
}Meeting of a political committee. A meeting is uniquely identified by committee, year and meeting number (within the year).
http://dev.hel.fi/openahjo/v1/meeting/5/?format=json
{
"policymaker": "/openahjo/v1/policymaker/26/",
"policymaker_name": "Asuntotuotantotoimikunta",
"date": "2013-05-08",
"id": 5,
"minutes": false,
"number": 6,
"resource_uri": "/openahjo/v1/meeting/5/",
"year": 2013
}An issue being discussed and decided on at different committee meetings. One
issue can be discussed in several different meetings. The resource agenda_item
links issues to meetings.
http://dev.hel.fi/openahjo/v1/issue/148/?format=json
{
"category": "/openahjo/v1/category/419/",
"category_name": "Asemakaavoitus",
"category_origin_id": "10 03 03",
"geometries": [
{
"coordinates": [24.93393763640416, 60.16417504680238],
"name": "Albertinkatu 27",
"type": "Point"
}
],
"id": 148,
"register_id": "HEL 2011-004632",
"resource_uri": "/openahjo/v1/issue/148/",
"slug": "hel-2011-004632",
"subject": "Kampin tontin 72/2 asemakaavan muuttaminen (nro 12145; Albertinkatu 27 b)",
"summary": "Asemakaavan muutosehdotus mahdollistaa liikerakennusten korttelialueen muuttamisen asuin-, liike- ja toimistorakennusten korttelialueeksi. Tontin rakennusoikeuden määrä 2575 k-m2 ja suurin sallittu kerrosluku 5 säilyvät ennallaan. Maantasokerros säilyy myymäläkäytössä. Lisäksi ullakkotasolle saadaan sijoittaa joitakin pääkäyttötarkoituksen mukaisia tiloja ja sinne tulee sijoittaa asukkaiden oleskeluun tarkoitettuja tiloja, kuten talosauna, jota kuitenkaan ei lueta em. rakennusoikeuteen. Kaava mahdollistaa tontilla nykyisin sijaitsevan rakennuksen säilyttämisen mutta rakennusta ei kaavassa suojella. Olemassa olevan rakennuksen rakennusoikeus on noin 1000 k-m2 suurempi kuin asemakaavaehdotuksen rakennusoikeus."
}The issue resource also provides a search interface. The interface includes Solr-powered full-text, spatial and faceted search capabilities. The following parameters are accepted:
limit, page
Allows specifying how many results and which page of results to return.
text
Full-text search terms. The parameter is passed to Haystack's auto_query, so it supports negation, exact matches etc.
category
Limits search to issues from given category id.
district
Limits search to issues from given districts. Multiple district ids can be given separated by commas.
bbox
Limits search geospatially to the given bounding box (left, bottom, right, top in standard WGS-84 coordinate format).
order_by
Specifies in which order the returned results should be. Currently only supports latest_decision_date, -latest_decision_date and relevance.
http://dev.hel.fi/openahjo/v1/issue/search/?text=guggenheim&format=json
All the issues are under one category each. The category list was made by scraping a PDF.
Agenda item describes an item on a meeting agenda. An agenda item always links
to one issue. The textual content often differs based the meeting and committee,
so the content in stored in agenda_item instead of issue. Contents of issue
and meeting are copied into agenda_item in order to accommodate fewer API
accesses.
http://dev.hel.fi/openahjo/v1/agenda_item/1/?format=json
{
"attachments": [
{
"agenda_item": "/openahjo/v1/agenda_item/1/",
"file_type": "pdf",
"file_uri": "http://dev.hel.fi/openahjo/media/att/2b4dca8e2ee0467353205b55c47aa44cbf6500b8.pdf",
"hash": "2b4dca8e2ee0467353205b55c47aa44cbf6500b8",
"id": 1,
"name": "Asunto Oy Hietalahdenkatu 12",
"number": 1,
"public": true,
"resource_uri": "/openahjo/v1/attachment/1/"
}
],
"content": [
{
"text": "<p>Lautakunta päätti puoltaa Asunto Oy Hietalahdenkatu 12:sta perusparannushankkeen korkotukilainahakemusta.</p>",
"type": "resolution"
}, {
"text": "<p>Asunto Oy Hietalahdenkatu 12 on jättänyt korkotukilainahakemuksen lämmitysjärjestelmän osittaiseen uusimiseen sekä vesi- ja viemärijohtojen uusimiseen. Hankkeessa on 69 asuntoa ja asuntoala on 2368 asm². Rakennus on valmistunut vuonna 1918.</p> <p>Asumisen rahoitus- ja kehittämiskeskus varaa käytettävissä olevien myöntämisvaltuuksien mukaan korkotukilainat kunnan puoltamille hankkeille.</p> <p>Esittelijän näkemyksen mukaan hakemusta tulisi puoltaa.</p>",
"type": "presenter"
}
],
"from_minutes": true,
"id": 1,
"index": 35,
"issue": {
...
},
"last_modified_time": "2013-04-30T11:02:00",
"meeting": {
...
},
"resource_uri": "/openahjo/v1/agenda_item/1/"
}Currently, the city council meetings are recorded on video. One video resource
can either point to the whole recording (agenda_item is null), to the processing
of an agenda item (index is 0) or to an individual statement by a speaker
(index is non-zero and speaker is defined).
Supports filtering on agenda_item, meeting and speaker.
http://dev.hel.fi/openahjo/v1/video/2409/?format=json
{
"agenda_item": "/openahjo/v1/agenda_item/3219/",
"duration": 63,
"id": 2409,
"index": 3,
"meeting": "/openahjo/v1/meeting/19/",
"party": "",
"resource_uri": "/openahjo/v1/video/2409/",
"screenshot_uri": "http://dev.hel.fi/openahjo/media/video/6-2013/item5-3.jpg",
"speaker": "Pajunen Jussi",
"start_pos": 2327,
"url": "http://media.helsinkikanava.fi/valtuusto270313.mp4"
}
Required Debian packages:
language-pack-fi postgis postgresql-9.1-postgis libxml2-dev libxslt1-dev libavcodec-dev libavformat-dev libswscale-dev python-imaging
Shell commands:
sudo su postgres
createuser -R -S -D -P openahjo
createdb -O openahjo -T template0 -l fi_FI.UTF8 -E utf8 openahjo
psql openahjo
PostgreSQL commands:
CREATE EXTENSION postgis;
CREATE EXTENSION postgis_topology;
After the database is created, you need to create the tables:
./manage.py syncdb --all
./manage.py migrate --fake
Then you can just populate your tables (this will take a while):
./manage.py ahjo_import
You might want to enable logging by modifying local_settings.py as follows:
LOGGING = {
'version': 1,
'disable_existing_loggers': True,
'formatters': {
'verbose': {
'format': '%(levelname)s %(asctime)s %(module)s %(process)d %(thread)d %(message)s'
},
'simple': {
'format': '%(module)s %(asctime)s %(levelname)s %(message)s'
},
},
'handlers': {
'null': {
'level': 'DEBUG',
'class': 'django.utils.log.NullHandler',
},
'console':{
'level': 'DEBUG',
'class': 'logging.StreamHandler',
'formatter': 'simple'
},
},
'loggers': {
'django': {
'handlers': ['console'],
'level': 'WARNING',
'propagate': False,
},
'generic': {
'handlers': ['console'],
'level': 'WARNING',
'propagate': False,
},
'requests': {
'handlers': ['console'],
'level': 'WARNING',
'propagate': False,
},
'': {
'handlers': ['console'],
'level': 'DEBUG',
'propagate': False,
}
}
}