Taxonomy: Your taxi experience in NYC

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Alastair Coote a web developer currently living in New York is writing a series of posts about the development of Taxonomy a taxi assistant app he made using a free dataset of taxi drivers' names and IDs available at the NYC Open Data website.

Taxonomy uses the Foursquare API for venue search and checkings and CartoDB to store and query street intersections for any address in the city. Coote explains on his blog all the steps he took to develop the app from scratch including design and technical aspects like the customization of maps in a dark colour scheme (which gives a distinctive styling to the tiles).

"I had no idea how to make custom maps so I learnt by doing" he writes.

The result is an impressive work. With Taxonomy you can track your trip calculate the time to destination "get a cab before you even leave home" review your experience and tell your friends about it. The app returns street intersections when you search by name or street address. If you share a cab you can bill your friends using Venmo. There are plenty of options to evaluate your taxi experience.

Taxonomy has been submitted to NYC BigApps competition and it's available for free at the App Store (there's an Android version also on the way). You can vote for Taxonomy here.