DataHippo Project

What is this?

DataHippo is a collaborative effort to provide data of different platforms of tourist rental like Airbnb or HomeAway. We obtain these data with several techniques of web-scrapping, and we share it openly, in order to facilitate studies and research about this phenomenon.

About us

In recent years various projects have obtained and shared openly data and analysis of different tourist rental web platforms to allow a better understanding of their impact in the territory. Projects like indiseairbnb.com (global), disnairbnb.cat (Mallorca) or airbnbvsberlin.com (Berlin) enable to quantify the online tourist rental phenomenon.

Platforms like Airbnb or Homeway are not providing these data publicly so municipalities and citizens are looking for ways to obtain the information and analyse it. At the same time there are companies that sell services around these data.

DataHippo wants to make easier the access to the data in different tourist rental web platforms.

History

In the summer of 2017, at the SummerLab organized by Montera34 and Hirikilabs in Tabakalera (Donostia, Spain) we met some of these actors, and decided to develop a project to share efforts.

Goals

  • Collect tourist apartments data globally
  • Structure and clean up the collected data
  • Offer data in an open, accessible and free way to the community

What are we going to do

  • Develop a Rest API to be able to offer and store data collectively
  • Automate data clean and processing and dump task periodically
  • Publish a website to download data from any region

How can I participate?

  • Analyzing the data and publishing analysis, visualizations and other materials. Write us and link to them
  • Compiling data from internet and sharing it with us. Write us for more details.

How do we get the data?

  • We develop programs that 'visit' every web page, (like Google and others) and save the information to our database.
  • We do not use any intrusive technique, or that involves deceiving the pages we visit.
  • We do not pass for humans or use false accounts.
  • We only collect information that platforms offer publicly.

What data do we have?

  • At the moment we offer the tourist apartment's ads basic data (location, price, capacity, id of the owner ...). We look forward to providing detailed occupancy data in the future.
  • See details: datamodels
  • See tips and advice: faqs

License

This database is licensed under the Open Database License and contents under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license.

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Have a nice scraping!