Once I had determined I was going to use London Air API and OpenWeatherMap’s API it made it easy to design my own API.

I find that documenting this process is essential as otherwise I would forget the decisions I’d made during planning and investigation when it came time to actually write the code.

Should I Cycle API

Document version

Date	Version	Author	Comments
25 August 2014	0.1	Matt Frear	Initial version

Cycle endpoint

GET

/v1/cycle?location=London,uk&airquality=wa7,wa9

Arguments

Name	Type	Required	Description
location	string	1	The location for weather results. e.g. London,uk We will call OpenWeatherMap’s forecast service with this info http://api.openweathermap.org/data/2.5/forecast? q=London,uk&units=metric
airquality	string	0..n	A site code to check for pollution. This parameter can be passed as a comma-separated list to check multiple sites, e.g. /v1/cycle?location=london&airquality=wa7,wa6 We will call London Air’s API for each location. A list of available locations is at: http://api.erg.kcl.ac.uk/AirQuality/Information/Monito ringSites/GroupName=London/Json e.g. Putney’s is WA7. We will call: http://api.erg.kcl.ac.uk/AirQuality/Hourly/ MonitoringIndex/SiteCode=WA7/Json

Response

The response format will be JSON.

Name	Type	Description
city	string	The name of the City
temp	int	Temperature in degrees Celcius
symbol	int	OpenWeatherMap’s symbol for the current condition
windDegree	int	The wind direction in degrees from 0 to 359
windDirection	string	The 3 digit code for the wind direction, e.g. ENE
windSpeed	int	The wind speed in m/s
windStrength	string	A text description for the wind speed, e.g. “Moderate breeze”
pollution	[]	An array of pollution readings for each sensor requested

A pollution reading looks like

Name	Type	Description
name	string	The Sitecode requested, e.g. WA7
speciesCode	string	The type of reading, e.g. NO2
airQualityIndex	int	The level of pollution, where 1 = low and 10 = high

The API document is hosted in Google Docs over here: Should I Cycle API.