Technology

By Cindy Deng, August 4th, 2015

Our website implemented four different APIs to provide the user with the most up to date and real time search results. When the user opens the Go Places page, the browser will ask the user for his or her current location. The information is fed to the Mapbox interactive map and will display a map with a marker at the current location.

Next the user can enter the address they would like to depart from. If the first text-field is left empty, the current location will be used. The input will be given to the Google Maps API and once the map is refreshed with new markers, each marker will contain links to seek directions to go to to the marker from either your current location or the entered address.

The places text field enables the user to search for anything they want. The input will be given to the Foursquare API, which will give back a set of JSON code of places that fit the user’s query. HandiMap will then process the JSON and put the venues as markers onto the map.

The checklist on the bottom of the page is for the disabled people or their helpers to see what kind of facilities the venue has. When the user clicks on the marker, the marker will have information about the accessibility according to the checklist. The information about the venues came from an online API called Access Together, which has information about over 4000 places in America. It is still lacking information in some areas on the west coast, so the data might be inaccurate. Access Together’s information can be accessed by a Google Fusion Table. With a query to the table, HandiMap will provide the most up to date information about each venue.

This website was built with HTML, CSS, a Bootstrap theme, JQuery, JavaScript, SQL, and JSON. The APIs we used are Google Maps API, Google Fusion Table, Access Together, and FourSquare API.