The initial release is big. It includes more than 215,000 responses to questions from more than 13,000 polls, which the HuffPost Pollster team has organized by subject and geography into more than 200 charts. Per their announcement, “the data feeds operate in real time, so shortly after we add a new poll to our database, itll appear in the HuffPost Pollster APIs responses and calculations.”Adding to the coolness is that the effort relies heavily on open source tools. The HuffPost Pollster team is publishing the data as an HTTP-based application programming interface, or API, with JSON and XML responses. They are releasing the data under a creative commons license.
via The HuffingtonPost releases Pollster, open source API for public polls | opensource.com.
This lets developers get access to a large body of polling data from over 13,000 polls. The API provides JSON and XML responses to queries sent over HTTP allowing developers to parse and display the information in their applications. This represents a major open source resource in the political field.