Adding to our real time stack of 311 and 511 data, we got to work making 911 more real time using
Server-Sent Events (SSE) in any browser or mobile device. 911 emergency data is harder to find in a web API that is updated with any frequency, but thanks to our friends over at Socrata we were able to find a feed of 911 events in Baltimore, MD, and we were able to proxy it using Streamdata.io, and then published as a simple prototype to show what is possible.
We took the API path for the 911 emergency data provided by Open Data Baltimore and another link.
Then we plugged the API path into a simple prototype we deployed as a simple streaming web page using the Streamdata.io JavaScript SDK. To create your own, all you have to do is take the HTML page below, plug in your own Streamdata.io API key and you will have a real-time streaming version of the Baltimore 911 emergency data or any other 911 data provide by Socrata—they have several other datasets available.
Not all 911 emergency data providers have a JSON API like Baltimore does, so we’ll be targeting any other existing 911 APIs we can find. Next on our target list is Seattle, who has an API for their 911 data, but after that, we’ll have to hunt for other usable 911 APIs. Most 911 providers will require converting RSS feeds in APIs, and even scraping 911 HTML listings and turn into JSON feeds, before we can proxy and make real-time using Streamdata.io—so we are probably going to need some local help.
If you’d like to see the 911 emergency data for your city or region be available in a streaming format, please reach out. We’ll see what we can do to help you identify any feeds and see what we can do to make things more real-time when it comes to knowing about emergencies in your community.
You can find the demo for this project over at Github or get at the scripts behind it at the Github repository. It is a pretty basic example of a listing page, but it gets the point across what you can do when streaming 911 emergency data.
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