Datarella now provides an API for our app ‘explore’, that allows every user to access the data collected and stored by the app.
An Application Programming Interface, in short API, is an interface for accessing software or databases externally. Web-APIs giving us access via the internet, have become the principle condition for most businesses in the web. Whenever we pay something online with our credit card, the shop system accesses our account via the API of the card issuing company. Ebay, Amazon, PayPal -they all provide us with their APIs to automatize their whole functionality to be included in our own website’s services. Most social networks offer APIs, too. Through these we can post automatic messages, analyze data about usage and reach, or control ad campaigns.
The ‘explore’ app was developed by Datarella to access the smartphones internal sensors (or probes), and to store the data. It is however not just about standard data like location, widely known because of Google Maps. ‘explore’ reads all movements in three dimensions via the gyroscope, accelleration, magnetic fields in the environment. Mobile network providers and Wifis in reception are also tracked. From these data we can learn many interesting things about ourself, our surroundings and environment, and about our behavior. To set the data in context, the API also gives out data from other users. For the sake of privacy and information self-determination, this is aggregated and averaged over several users, so that identification of a specific person is not possible.
With our API, Datarella commits to open data: We are convinced, that data has to be available for users.
➜ Here is our API’s documentation: explore.datarella.com/data_1.0.html
➜ Here the download-link for ‘explore’: play.google.com
We are excited to learn, what you will make from the data.
