Chicago-Beach-Bot

This is a Twitter bot built using Tweeply for Python. This bot works on mentions to @ChicagoBeachBot using Twitter's streaming API. On mention, it will send a request to Chicago's SODA API (https://dev.socrata.com/foundry/data.cityofchicago.org/xvsz-3xcj) and parse the JSON file for the requested name of the beach. It then replies to the user with the predicted daily value of CFU.

Why?

This Summer has seen an increasing amount of beach closures due to high levels of E.Coli levels measured in colony forming units/100mL. When levels exceed 235 CFU the beach is shut down. The data is very easily accessible, and the City of Chicago actually provides a fairly intuitive way for people to check if a beach is open or closed. But many people aren't aware of it as it isn't a topic that's talked about too often in the news. I created this bot with the intention of making it easier for an average person to quickly find information on a beach using Twitter, the social platform where a bot like this actually has a use.

How can I make one for my city?

If there is any similar data provided by your city through Socrata, most of the modifications should be in the process_data function. If Socrata isn't available but there is an API, I would suggest using the requests library and working off of that with Pandas. The on_status method is part of Tweepy, and it handles the "tweeting" functionality of the bot. The bot focuses on using Twitter and Tweepy's streaming api rather than fetching the data periodically. In __init__ I initialize the beaches dictionary. This is a dictionary of 'valid' beach names that is used in on_status. For a different city, you would just need to change the keys to the new beach names and attempt to account for the short-hand way of referencing them or for the local and unofficial names.

Built With

• pandas
• python
• socrata-open-data
• tweepy