Opening Up 17 Years of Humanitarian Data: The Journey from RSS Feed to Public API

by Adam Ross @ APIStrat 2014 in Chicago

Transcript

1. ReliefWeb’s Journey of RSS Feed to API 9/26/2014
2. What is ReliefWeb? Why does it have an API? How was it built? What did it take to open it? What’s next?
3. Software Architect & API Designer
 Email: aross@phase2technology.com Adam Ross Twitter: @grayside_sb
4. What is • ReliefWeb is a specialized digital service for the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs) established in 1996. • Global staff of 30 content editors aggregating and curating content on a daily basis for the Humanitarian sector. • Over half a million items, growing by tens of thousands per year, especially in the community-sourced areas of jobs and
5. RSS Was Not Enough • “Here are the last 10 things: build your UI” • Deep integrations are RSS-driven migrations, you need to build an entire application and be responsible for your own scraped copy. • This means lots of overhead for innovation
6. So they Made an API • Built a mobile version of the site • Built a trends & analytics site to examine what’s going on in the world across decades • Building a new search system on top of the API
7. Built on Open Source PHP nginx ElasticSearch Swagger Composer Klein Elastica Jenkins ... etc
8. Especially • Provides a wealth of search & analysis functionality for the API. • Booming community of tools, especially monitoring. • Separately scales from main content storage. • API app focuses on creating a developer experience.
9. • Public data, public need, public innovation. • Already have a webapp, what more could we need? • (A systematically managed platform.) Opening the API
10. API Provider says... Scale Analytics Policing API Consumer says... Reliability Usability Documentation Invested
11. Usability & • Hypermedia • JSON • CORS (Browser-friendliness) • Backwards Compatibility a.k. Forwards Compatibility • Testing (all the ways) • Getting here is a new version and over 80% code change
12. More People Sharing ReliefWeb’s • Want people to be able to easily execute on ideas • There’s not time to spend days or weeks learning the system. • Meaningful usage helps fulfill ReliefWeb’s goals and drives technology investment.
13. Roadmap Teaser • Infrastructure Upgrade to improve Reliability & Scale • Usage analytics to target improvements and monitor community impact. • SDK & Web Widgets to facilitate integration • Geo & Semantic use cases
14. reliefweb.int api.rwlabs.or
15. PHASE2TECHNOLOGY.COM