Interacting With Web Services

Overview

Teaching: 5 min
Exercises: 10 min

Questions

• How can I retrieve data from a public web service?

Objectives

• Many public data repositories now make their data available for query via Web Services. Web Services uses generally the same technology and concepts as human website users browsing webpages, but the requests and responses involve structured data instead of text and image content designed for humans to read.
• These services are meant to be communicated with via a program or script, but many can be explored “by hand” especially if their input and output formats are text-based (such as CSV or JSON).
• Web services will come with their own documentation that explains how to access its resources, and some will also offer packages for popular programming languages that do much of the heavy lifting for you. You should always check to see if a premade package exists before trying to interact with the service directly.
• Today we will learn how to directly interact with a web service.

Key Points