NISO RESTful Scholarly APIs Workshop Review and Summary

By Catherine Dixon
Boston, MA

This fall I participated in a NISO workshop on scholarly RESTful APIs and given the upcoming API conference NEASIS&T is holding (January 8th, 2018, details here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/understanding-and-using-apis-tickets-39730351551) I thought I would share my experience with my fellow metadata and technology enthusiasts. The course consisted of eight weeks of 1.5 to 2 hour lectures, given by professionals who work at open access and proprietary information providers we are all familiar with. On the agenda we had a review of HTTP commands and a review of RESTful concepts followed by presentations of the APIs for CrossRef, ORCID, NLM/PubMed, OCLC, SCOPUS, and the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIF).

We started out with a review of HTTP commands and the definition of RESTful APIs. REST stands for Representational State Transfer and is a set of constraints applied to existing interchange format standards