Re: APIs to work with data on the web

Laufer,

Are Application Programming Interfaces, Open or Closed, within scope for a 
Data on the Web BP working group?  That is, do we need to recommend how 
applications interface with data in order to create best practices in how 
data is published, described, qualified, quantified, and compared. 

And if API's are in scope where does Data end and Application Best 
Practices begin? 


Best Regards,

Steve

Motto: "Do First, Think, Do it Again"



From:
Laufer <laufer@globo.com>
To:
"public-dwbp-wg@w3.org" <public-dwbp-wg@w3.org>
Date:
03/17/2014 03:20 PM
Subject:
Re: APIs to work with data on the web



Hi All,

I listed some links of this thread:
How to Design a Good API & Why it Matters 
https://www.youtube..com/watch?v=aAb7hSCtvGw

http://ruben.verborgh.org/blog/2013/11/29/the-lie-of-the-api/

http://www.socrata.com/

Open Data Fragments (Ruben Verborgh) is a very interesting work too:  
http://linkeddatafragments.org/


All these links talk about important features of APIs. As Joshua Bloch 
pointed in his presentation, we have diverse APIs layers to build an 
application. Today is very commom to develop a mashup using a set of APIs 
to compose a final result. Even a SPARQL endpoint could be seen as an API 
with a very flexible way of passing parameters to obtain some data as a 
result.

The difference of Open Data Access APIs (I don't know what would be the 
term) could be that the state of the world does not change(I know it is a 
very strong assertion). We don't have tasks predefined. The requests are 
only for data. The only "task" is to obtain data. All other kinds of tasks 
would be implemented by applications built by developers or tools that use 
Open Data Access APIs. 

So we could think in this kind of APIs and think in what should be a very 
basic set of funcionalities provided to the developers, considering all 
types of Open Data.

The Use Case included by Deirdre is excellent to group all these issues.

It's a very good discussion.

Best Regards,
Laufer



2014-03-17 12:34 GMT-03:00 Steven Adler <adler1@us.ibm.com>:
Excellent use case which begins to explore and spell out the advantages 
and trade-offs of using API's to access Open Data.  I would like to 
explore this topic in greater detail.  My own personal preference is data 
access by HTTP and URI, because it provides a common interface for humans 
and machines.  But are there performance implications? 


Best Regards,

Steve

Motto: "Do First, Think, Do it Again" 


From: 
"Lee, Deirdre" <Deirdre.Lee@deri.org> 
To: 
Newton Calegari <newton@nic.br>, Makx Dekkers <mail@makxdekkers.com> 
Cc: 
"public-dwbp-wg@w3.org" <public-dwbp-wg@w3.org> 
Date: 
03/17/2014 11:19 AM 
Subject: 
RE: APIs to work with data on the web





Hi all, 
  
Very interesting article indeed and related to discussions we’re currently 
having with developers as part of Open Data Ireland on how best to 
publish/use machine-readable data. 
  
I’ve added a use-case on it https://www.w3.org/2013/dwbp/wiki/Use_Cases 
Please feel free to add points or pick up on nuances of the conversation 
that I missed. Perhaps we could break this into multiple use-cases to look 
at each of the aspects in more detail? 
  
Cheers, 
Deirdre 
  
  
From: Newton Calegari [mailto:newton@nic.br] 
Sent: 17 March 2014 13:19
To: Makx Dekkers
Cc: public-dwbp-wg@w3.org
Subject: Re: APIs to work with data on the web 
  
Hi Laufer, I didn't know the Socrata. 
Thanks for share the link, Makx. Very interesting text and point of view 
about APIs. 
  
BR, 
  
Newton 
  
Em 14/03/2014, à(s) 15:58, Makx Dekkers <mail@makxdekkers.com> escreveu: 


For a different perspective on APIs, see this: 
http://ruben.verborgh.org/blog/2013/11/29/the-lie-of-the-api/ 
  
Makx. 
  
From: Newton Calegari [mailto:newton@nic.br] 
Sent: Thursday, March 13, 2014 6:03 PM
To: public-dwbp-wg@w3.org
Subject: APIs to work with data on the web 
  
Hi all, 
  
          Last week, Yaso and I were talking about APIs and how they are 
important in all aspects of data on the web. APIs are one of the simplest 
ways to access and to distribute data across the web, and we think that is 
an important subject to be discussed on the WG. 
          To talk about APIs, we obviously need to discuss about URI and 
descriptors. Carrasco written the first document [1] about it, besides 
there are a few messages discussing it. 
          Moreover, I want to share some links I consider relevant and 
useful to discuss about this topic. 
          Joshua Bloch, a software engineer and former Googler, published 
an article on InfoQ [2] site and made a presentation called “How to Design 
a Good API & Why it Matters” [3] (other Jushua's presentation about the 
same subject, but the video is hosted on YouTube [4]). These links are 
very interesting and I recommend to all of you, even who is already expert 
in API design. 
  
[1] Data on the Web URI Best Practices: 
http://www.w3.org/2013/dwbp/wiki/Data_on_the_Web_URI_Best_Practices 
[2] Joshua Bloch: Bumper-Sticker API Design: 
http://www.infoq.com/articles/API-Design-Joshua-Bloch?utm_source=buffer&utm_campaign=Buffer&utm_content=buffer36801&utm_medium=twitter#.UvbdCPy0BT0.delicious 

[3] How to Design a Good API & Why it Matters: 
http://www.infoq.com/presentations/effective-api-design 
[4] How to Design a Good API & Why it Matters (YouTube version): 
https://www.youtube..com/watch?v=aAb7hSCtvGw 
  
Best Regards, 
Newton 
  




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