US State Professional Licenses

• 

  Professional License

Inspiration

We wanted to make US Government data more accessible to the public. Through the Data.gov initiative, each States release their own dataset for Licensing and Regulation. We wanted to check whether Professional and Business has a valid License.

What it does

It's an API endpoint where you can call and request data for your specific US States and Agency. It will return data about a Professional individual or a Business operating in a US States that need license. It will show whether a License is valid or not.

How we built it

The backend we used AWS Services. The entire system is serverless (API Gateway, Lambda, S3, DynamoDB). We wrote the code in Python and published it on Github here: https://github.com/kpx-dev/licenses

Challenges we ran into

The dataset from each US States is different, so there's a lot of manual parsing for each States. Even in the same State, data can be corrupted, missing header. There's also a lot of data so ingesting it quickly to our AWS DyanmoDB can take sometime because we want to be cost sensitive for this project.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We were able to load most of dataset for California!

What we learned

Data provided by States can be bad, a lot of manual processing. We actually learned to work as a team remotely effectively through text message and Postman Team. The update to Postman Collection is live.

What's next for US State Professional Licenses

We plan to use AWS Datawrangler to manage the parsing instead of writing custom code.

Built With

• amazon-web-services
• data.gov
• dynamodb
• lambda
• python
• sam