Data Feeds for London air quality
Providing our data for all to create new websites and applications.
What is it?
Our data has always been available on this website, but creating data feeds makes it available for use by developers to widen access
to information and combine it with other information. We are giving live access to air quality information and data for London in a structured
format. This allows software to easily request and then read in the data. It is intended to be used by web pages and smartphone applications,
to allow them to include air quality information for London. We have tried to include high level information in this system to minimise errors
in calculation by users, for example to air quality objectives. This system allows external organisations and individuals to create new
applications and combine air quality information with other data. Air quality data can also be manually downloaded using our
data download pages.
How does it work?
We have created an Application Programming Interface (API)
for our air quality data. This uses a copy of our live database, which validates the data and calculates information like air quality indexes
and objectives. This has a set of possible requests that try to cover everything we think people would want. Information is requested using web
page (http) protocol, and the exact request allows the definition of variables such as dates, that specify exactly what is wanted. Data is then
returned to the request, mostly in the machine readable formats of XML
or JSON. These formats are easy for applications and websites to
read and use.
How do you use it?