A rough percentage of snowy photos in London

snow_data_mining.py

#!/usr/bin/python

import simplejson
import urllib

api_url = 'http://api.flickr.com/services/rest/'
api_method = 'flickr.photos.search'
api_key = '6cbbb899ee09051e575a63f57e954a5a'

results = {}

def get_count(min_taken_date, max_taken_date, text):
  url_query = {'method': api_method, 'api_key': api_key, 'min_taken_date': min_taken_date,
               'max_taken_date': max_taken_date, 'text': text, 'format': 'json', 
               'nojsoncallback': 1}
  url = api_url + '?' + urllib.urlencode(url_query)
  print "fetching %s" % url
  response = urllib.urlopen(url)
  document = simplejson.load(response)
  count = document['photos']['total']
  print "  returning count %s for text %s" % (count, text)
  return int(count)

for year in range(2001, 2013):
  next_year = year+1
  
  print "Handling year %s/%s" % (year, next_year)
  
  min_taken_date = "%s-09-01 00:00:00" % year
  max_taken_date = "%s-09-01 00:00:00" % next_year
  
  snow = get_count(min_taken_date, max_taken_date, 'snow london -ontario')
  total = get_count(min_taken_date, max_taken_date, 'london -ontario')
  percent = float(snow)*100/total
  
  results[year] = {'snow': snow, 'total': total, 'percent': percent}

for year in results:
  print "%s\t%s\t%s\t%4f" % (year, 
                             results[year]['snow'], 
                             results[year]['total'], 
                             results[year]['percent'])