Do you want to dive deeper into Mapineq Link Database? Our API allows you to dynamically query the database to pull spatially-linked data on-the-fly directly into your local data analysis environment or bespoke web applications.

Note: The Mapineq API is still under development and may not yet be 100% stable. We will help you stay informed about changes by keeping the API documentation up-to-date as new features are developed.

An API (Application Programming Interface) can be thought of as a middleman that allows different software to talk to each other. The Mapineq API serves as a bridge between your software or website and the Mapineq database server. Instead of directly accessing the PostgreSQL database, you can send a request to the API (e.g. give me internet speed test data spatially linked with youth unemployment data), and the API will fetch it for you. This makes it easier for you to get the information you need without dealing with the database directly.

Learning resources

If you are looking for a gentle introduction, we would suggest watching the Mapineq webinar walk-through of the API which was a session from the Mapineq Webinar Series hosted by Population Europe.

You can find more detailed tutorials and technical documentation at https://docs.mapineq.org. These learning resources introduce how to use the API from R or Python along with complete technical documentation that describes all API endpoints that are available. If you are most interested in grabbing data from the Mapineq database to integrate into your own research, you may want to start with the R tutorial or the Python tutorial. If you are a software or web developer who wants to integrate the Mapineq API into your own software or web applications, then the API technical documentation may be a good starting point for you.

Community Projects

The core Mapineq team has big plans, but we can't do it alone! We are excited to support and encourage community-led development of software and websites (especially open-source) to find creative solutions that improve access to innovative inequality data using the Mapineq API and database. We want to celebrate some of these community-led software development efforts here, and we hope to highlight your work here one day soon!

Just a few short weeks after the initial launch of the Mapineq Link Dashboard and API, we already see ambitious community-led software being developed to make the API more effective for you:

Contribute

We welcome your suggestions and contributions to development of the Mapineq Link source code. You can find our open-source code at the Mapineq GitHub repository. If you have ideas for new features or if you find bugs, please open an issue in the GitHub repository to let us know so that we can work together to find solutions. If you want to get your hands on the code and offer your own solutions, please feel free to fork the repository and submit pull requests with your own coding solutions for the Mapineq development team to review.