[occi-wg] US govt GSA study group issues 1st draft of API standards

[Sill, Alan]

Dear OCCI folks,

I thought you would like to see this as I think it represents good work.

The US White House Presidential Innovation Fellows program has been sponsoring work to improve public access to government data via APIs. As part of this process, which is sponsored and run out of the US GSA (General Services Administration) in an open public process, there is a useful set of GitHub repositories and an associated information page:

https://github.com/18f

I have been increasingly impressed with the quality of volunteers in the 18F group and the work they have produced. 

They have recently produced a compact set of API standard recommendations to go along with this work:

https://github.com/18F/api-standards

These describe the user-faciing aspects of the implementation details of the API and make recommendations for maximum utility and reuse.  The release is described in a blog entry at the following location and I think this is worthwhile reading.

http://18fblog.tumblr.com/post/91868213233/hot-off-the-press-18fs-api-standards

The standards themselves are very compact and I think are quite sensible. I would like to encourage you to read them and suggest that you comment if you have any input; would also like to see if the ideas here have any impact on your thinking about OCCi API design and usage. Although OCCI is not just an API and is not only limited to data, there are some recommendations - such as use of https everywhere and support for CORS, which is a web API design element but could have significant influence on the design of user-oriented service control APIs through federation of multi-site controls - that I think it would be good for us to think about as work on things like OCCI evolves in OGF.

Thanks,

Alan