Guide to Including APIs in the Agency Data Catalog
API discovery is an important component to any developer program. You want anyone who might be interested in using your APIs to be able to find them with ease. A critical component is including your APIs in your agency’s Enterprise Data Listing (used within the agency and submitted to OMB) and Public Data Listing (located at agency.gov/data.json)
Overview
- Review the APIs listed on any of your agency’s developer hubs.
- Review this list of individual APIs for any that are managed by your agency.
- Add these and any other APIs managed by your agency in your data catalogs, with a focus on ensuring that each API be represented by a distribution object that includes
"format":"API". Over time, this will be one way in which the growth of APIs is tracked across the federal government. In order to be ‘counted’, an API would need to be described in the public data listing of an agency using"format":"API".
Below is an example distribution of an agency API.
More guidance on describing APIs in the metadata schema can be found on Project Open Data.