Open-data dashboard aggregating 143 feeds for Alberta municipalities

Name: Open-data dashboard aggregating 143 feeds for Alberta municipalities
Availability: InStock
Author: flossypurse

by flossypurse·Mar 13, 2026·1 point·0 comments

Visit Project View on HN

AI Analysis

●MidNiche GemSolve My Problem

Regional economic dashboard, but public data aggregation isn't novel.

Strengths

•Normalizes 18 different government API formats including ArcGIS, Socrata, and StatsCan SOAP endpoints.
•Covers 30 municipalities with parcel-level data from 22 municipal ArcGIS endpoints.
•Server-side fetching with PostgreSQL fallback handles upstream government API outages.

Weaknesses

•14-day free trial monetizes data that's already publicly available from government sources.
•Regional dashboards like this exist for other provinces and countries with similar approaches.

Post Description

I built a dashboard, Claude helped ;), that aggregates 143+ open government data feeds into a single view of Alberta's economy, covering 30 municipalities (~4.5M population).

Data sources include Bank of Canada (rates, CAD/USD), StatsCan (GDP, CPI, unemployment), CER (pipeline throughput, oil/gas production — 16 feeds), AESO (electricity pool pricing), IRCC (immigration), municipal ArcGIS endpoints (22 municipalities with parcel-level data), Edmonton/Calgary Socrata APIs, and Alberta's regional dashboard (54 indicators for all ~340 municipalities).

Tech: Next.js 16, React 19, TypeScript, better-sqlite3, Recharts. All data fetched server-side from live government APIs. PostgreSQL fallback for upstream outages. ISR on embeddable chart routes.

The interesting technical challenge was normalizing data across very different government API formats — ArcGIS feature services, Socrata SODA, StatsCan's WDS SOAP-to-JSON API, fixed-width text files (AER well licences), and various CSV/JSON endpoints. Each municipality's ArcGIS has different field names for the same concepts (assessed value might be TOTAL_ASSESS, TOTALASSESSEDVALUE, Total_Value, etc.).

I live in Parkland County (west of Edmonton) and built this because I wanted economic indicators for my area without checking a dozen government portals. Planning to monetize the municipality deep-dives at $29/mo while keeping macro data free.

Happy to answer questions about the architecture or the government data landscape.