User:Roelroscama/API

Goal

To aggregate news/data on drone attacks from different sources automatically. Inspired by the Drone+ app that is constantly blocked by the iOS appstore.

Analysis of Drone+

According to an article on Wired.com the Drone+ app "tells users when a strike has occurred, going off a publicly available database of strikes compiled by the U.K.’s Bureau of Investigative Journalism, which compiles media accounts of the strikes."

So Drone+ uses a single source that is itself an aggregate of media accounts.

The Bureau of Investigative Journalism doesn't have an API as far as I know, however they do have the option to sign up for e-mail alerts. I'm hoping this is the 'feed' that Drone+ taps into. I registered to the mailing list but since there have been no recent drone strikes I haven't received any mails by the list. It appears that someone will have to get killed before I get to see if the list provides me with the right data, which is a weird realization.

However if the list does provide me with the right data I could subscribe to the list with a new gmail account and use Gmail's Inbox Feed API to extract the data I need automatically. I think this or something similar is what Drone+ does.

I do suspect the list will provide me with the right data, because their blog posts already contain valuable information such as: estimated deaths, estimated injuries, date of attack, location of attack, amount of missles fired and the media that reported it.

Other possible methods

I guess that another viable method would be to tap into the RSS feeds or possibly APIs of various news websites.

This list here shows that a lot of reliable news sources have APIs. Including press bureaus AP and Reuters.