by
parmentierf
One thing that bubbled up at code4lib2009 last week was the notion that APIs Suck. Not that web2.0 APIs are wrong or bad…they’re actually great, especially when compared to a world where no machine access to the data existed before. The point is that sometimes just having access to the raw data in the ‘lowest level format’ is the ideal. Rather than service providers trying to guess what you are trying to do with their data, and absorbing the computational responsibility of delivering it, why not make the data readily available using a protocol like HTTP? Put the data in a directory, turn on Indexes, do some sensible caching, and maybe gzip compression and let people grab it, and robots to crawl it. Or maybe use something like Amazon Public Datasets. It seems like a relatively easy first step, that involves very little custom software development, and one with the ability make a huge impact.
api
web