Toronto Open Data, Data Normalization, and the Amazon Echo / Alexa

[David Janes]

I just got an Alexa Skill published that used Toronto Open Data. It's called "Hey Toronto". What it does is allow you to control a website / kiosk using voice commands, e.g. "Show me skating rinks near Yonge & Eglinton".

You can see a video of it in action here: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_rPFNnhvHoI

The full story, including pointers to the source code and so forth is here: 

https://www.hackster.io/dpjanes/alexa-open-data-toronto-dbc9fc

Of particular note (to you programmer types) is the data normalization, where we take the disparate formats coming from the TOD (Shapefiles, XML, JSON, ...) and convert them into YAML using a Schema.org based vocabulary. For example, here's the "Cultural Hotspots" data set compiled:

https://github.com/dpjanes/alexa-opendata/blob/master/dst/cultural-hotspots.yaml

And the source code to do this is here:

https://github.com/dpjanes/alexa-opendata/tree/master/src/cultural-hotspots

Regards,
D.

[deniscarr]

Hi David,

Just checked this out. Very cool. Thanks for sharing. 

Denis Carr

Supervisor (IT) Open Data

City of Toronto

denis...@toronto.ca

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