1. RESTful API and application

Representational State Transfer (REST) is an architectural style that defines a set of constraints to be used for creating web services. Web services that conform to the REST architectural style, or RESTful web services, provide interoperability between computer systems on the Internet. REST-compliant web services allow the requesting systems to access and manipulate textual representations of web resources by using a uniform and predefined set of stateless operations. Other kinds of web services, such as SOAP web services, expose their own arbitrary sets of operations. The World Bank indicators API provides 50 year of data over more than 1500 indicators for countries around the world.

2. Prepare

This tool is developed by Python, using data from World Bank. Data is stored in mLab, Database-as-a-Service for MongoDB.

2.1 Python Packages

Flask==1.0.2
Flask-PyMongo==2.1.0
flask-restplus==0.11.0
pymongo==3.7.1
requests==2.19.1

2.2 Data Source

• List of indicators can be found at: http://api.w o rldbank.org/v2/indicators
• List of countries can be found at: http://api.worldbank.org/v2/countries

2.3 Connect to mLab

First, import pymongo

pip install pymongo

Use your own mLab database parameter to build connection

DB_NAME = 'database_name'
DB_HOST = 'yourhost.mlab.com'
DB_PORT = yourhost
DB_USER = 'database_user'
DB_PASS = 'database_password'

# Build connection to the database 
connection = pymongo.MongoClient(DB_HOST, DB_PORT)
db = connection[DB_NAME]
db.authenticate(DB_USER, DB_PASS)

3 Implementation

3.1 Import a collection from the data service

This operation can be considered as an on-demand ‘import’ operation. The service will download the JSON data for all countries respective to the year 2012 to 2017 and identified by the indicator id given by the user and process the content into an internal data format and store it in the database ( mLab ). API should return appropriate HTTP status code.

HTTP operation: POST /<collections>

# Create new collection in database
# db[*] can name a collection using variable, db.* can not
collection_id = "new_collection_id"
new_collection = db[collection_id]
# Insert collection json as document
new_collection.insert_one(collection)

3.2 Deleting a collection with the data service

3.3 Retrieve the list of available collections

3.4 Retrieve a collection

3.5 Retrieve economic indicator value for given country and a year

3.6 Retrieve top/bottom economic indicator values for a given year