The Joint Research Center (JRC) from the European Commission published, in the context of the APIs4Dgov study, a report on APIs analysing a set of standards.
The goal of the analysis presented in this brief report is to support the definition of stable APIs for digital government services adopted by governments or single public administration units. Such adoption would avoid the need to develop ad-hoc solutions that could have limited scalability or potential for reuse. Instead, the work suggests that we should consider a number of existing standards provided by standardisation bodies or, at least, technical specifications written by well-recognised consortia, vendors or users.
This report intends to support API stakeholders in the identification and selection of such solutions. To do this, it first gives a series of definitions to help the reader understand some basic concepts, as well as related standards and technical specifications. Then it presents the description and classification (by resource representation, security, usability, test, performance and licence) of the standards and technical specifications collected. A shortlist of these documents (based on their use, maintenance and stability) is proposed, together with a brief description of each of them. Also, a set of APIs related to European Commission initiatives is presented. Finally, the report provides a useful glossary with definitions of the relevant terms collected within the APIs4DGov study