Once I had determined I was going to use London Air API and OpenWeatherMap’s API it made it easy to design my own API.
I find that documenting this process is essential as otherwise I would forget the decisions I’d made during planning and investigation when it came time to actually write the code.
Should I Cycle API
Document version
| Date | Version | Author | Comments |
| 25 August 2014 | 0.1 | Matt Frear | Initial version |
Cycle endpoint
GET
/v1/cycle?location=London,uk&airquality=wa7,wa9
Arguments
| Name | Type | Required | Description |
| location | string | 1 | The location for weather results.
e.g. London,uk We will call OpenWeatherMap’s forecast service with this info http://api.openweathermap.org/data/2.5/forecast? |
| airquality | string | 0..n | A site code to check for pollution.
This parameter can be passed as a comma-separated list to check multiple sites, e.g. /v1/cycle?location=london&airquality=wa7,wa6 A list of available locations is at: http://api.erg.kcl.ac.uk/AirQuality/Information/Monito We will call: http://api.erg.kcl.ac.uk/AirQuality/Hourly/ |
Response
The response format will be JSON.
| Name | Type | Description |
| city | string | The name of the City |
| temp | int | Temperature in degrees Celcius |
| symbol | int | OpenWeatherMap’s symbol for the current condition |
| windDegree | int | The wind direction in degrees from 0 to 359 |
| windDirection | string | The 3 digit code for the wind direction, e.g. ENE |
| windSpeed | int | The wind speed in m/s |
| windStrength | string | A text description for the wind speed, e.g. “Moderate breeze” |
| pollution | [] | An array of pollution readings for each sensor requested |
A pollution reading looks like
| Name | Type | Description |
| name | string | The Sitecode requested, e.g. WA7 |
| speciesCode | string | The type of reading, e.g. NO2 |
| airQualityIndex | int | The level of pollution, where 1 = low and 10 = high |
The API document is hosted in Google Docs over here: Should I Cycle API.
