georss-qld-bushfire-alert-client 0.8

A GeoRSS client library for the Queensland Bushfire Alert feed.

python-georss-qld-bushfire-alert-client

This library provides convenient access to the Queensland Bushfire Alert Feed.

Installation

pip install georss-qld-bushfire-alert-client

Usage

See below for an example of how this library can be used. After instantiating the feed class and supplying the required parameters, you can call update to retrieve the feed data. The return value will be a tuple of a status code and the actual data in the form of a list of specific feed entries.

Status Codes

• UPDATE_OK: Update went fine and data was retrieved. The library may still return empty data, for example because no entries fulfilled the filter criteria.
• UPDATE_OK_NO_DATA: Update went fine but no data was retrieved, for example because the server indicated that there was not update since the last request.
• UPDATE_ERROR: Something went wrong during the update

Supported Filters

Filter		Description
Radius	filter_radius	Radius in kilometers around the home coordinates in which events from the feed are included.
Categories	filter_categories	Array of category names. Only events with a category matching any of these are included.

Example

from georss_qld_bushfire_alert_client import QldBushfireAlertFeed
# Home Coordinates: Latitude: -27.5, Longitude: 153.0
# Filter radius: 50 km
# Filter categories: 'Advice'
feed = QldBushfireAlertFeed((-27.5, 153.0), 
                            filter_radius=50, 
                            filter_categories=['Advice'])
status, entries = feed.update()

Feed entry properties

Each feed entry is populated with the following properties - subject to availability in GeoRSS feed:

Name	Description
geometry	All geometry details of this entry.
coordinates	Best coordinates (latitude, longitude) of this entry.
external_id	External id of this entry.
title	Title of this entry with textual description of location.
category	Category of this entry.
attribution	Attribution from feed.
distance_to_home	Distance in km of this entry to the home coordinates.
description	Full content of this entry.
published	Published date of this entry.
updated	Updated date of this entry.
status	Status of alert, e.g. "Patrolled", "Going", "Contained"

Feed Manager

The Feed Manager helps managing feed updates over time, by notifying the consumer of the feed about new feed entries, updates and removed entries compared to the last feed update.

• If the current feed update is the first one, then all feed entries will be reported as new. The feed manager will keep track of all feed entries' external IDs that it has successfully processed.
• If the current feed update is not the first one, then the feed manager will produce three sets:
  • Feed entries that were not in the previous feed update but are in the current feed update will be reported as new.
  • Feed entries that were in the previous feed update and are still in the current feed update will be reported as to be updated.
  • Feed entries that were in the previous feed update but are not in the current feed update will be reported to be removed.
• If the current update fails, then all feed entries processed in the previous feed update will be reported to be removed.

After a successful update from the feed, the feed manager will provide two different dates:

• last_update will be the timestamp of the last successful update from the feed. This date may be useful if the consumer of this library wants to treat intermittent errors from feed updates differently.
• last_timestamp will be the latest timestamp extracted from the feed data. This requires that the underlying feed data actually contains a suitable date. This date may be useful if the consumer of this library wants to process feed entries differently if they haven't actually been updated.