Data Access API Specification

Work in Progress

Purpose: to provide programmatic access to portions of the landwatch database for use in web applications + other visualization tools.

Context

The Landwatch Database consists of four primary components:

• United States Federal Public Lands
• United States Congressional Legislation (House + Senate)
• United States Congressional Legislators
• Campaign Finance Donations

These databases are intentionally linked together, because they represent a network. Only bills that reference U.S. lands are included; only legislators who sponsor those bills are included, and only donors that give to those legislators are included. Etc.

Here is a diagram of these links:

The API created will give access to these data in a programmatic way.

Design Considerations + Use-Cases

These are given in order of priority.

1. A User wants to see the "legislative story" of a given parcel (or set of parcels). The "legislative story" is: all of the bills, legislators, and campaign finance donors relevant to a single parcel.
2. A User wants to see the parcels influenced by a single industry (e.g. set of campaign finance donors, which are companies).
3. A User wants to see the parcels influenced by a single legislator.