Data APIs and Exploration with Infochimps

by Kin Lane on 03/24/2011

Infochimps recently launch some new API calls, and expect to be launching hundreds more in the coming months.

Infochimps is taking large data sets in areas likecensus, housing, and education and making them available via an API.

Also Infochimps is bundling these data sets and RESTful APIs with their API Explorer. This allows even non-developers to play with large data sets.

Some new API calls they've built are:

Qwerly - You know when you Google someone's name and through some SEO magic, you can find all of that person's social media profiles? Imagine being able to easily integrate these presences into your applications. Query a person's Twitter handle and the Qwerly API call will return any of his or her social media presences (Facebook, Friendfeed, Flickr, etc) that it can find.
Twitter People Search - Let's face it. Finding new cool people on Twitter can be a bit taxing. Query any word using Twitter People Search and find any user who uses that word in their bio. Looking for other data lovers? Check. Looking for people who like the Green Bay Packers? Check. Looking for Bieber lovers on Twitter? You'll have no problem there. ;-)
British National Corpus - Word lists are very popular on our site and we couldn't pass this one up. This API call allows you to access the British National Corpus, a 100-million-word text corpus of samples of written and spoken English from a wide range of sources. The corpus covers British English the late twentieth century from a wide variety of genres with the intention that it be a representative sample of spoken and written British English of that time.

Infochimps is not just liberating data via APIs, they are making it more accessible through their API explorer and data marketplace.

You can search for data that is free or paid, available for download or through their API, alphabetically, or by upload date.

Infochimps is also looking for suggestions for new APIs and datasets, you can submit ideas using the Infochimps UserVoice page.