Metadata standards used to describe the API services

Google Cloud Apigee
1

Which metadata standards are used to describe the API services (a title, dates of revision, who produced the API, on which data it is operating, …)? And are they based on international ones, like the ISO-standards on metadata, or the DCAT-AP from W3C?

Do you use too vocabularies or thesauri in those descriptions, for example to define themes, topics, organisations, location, … because of better search & find operations, to manage them?

And are you harvesting API’s into this tool, or is it a manual process to describe them in this management tool?

I’m searching for these answers because of the once only principle, where you can create API’s conform the API-standard, described in YAML, harvested in Apigee (used as the tool to manage the API’s), with a description of the nescessary metadata description of each of the API’s, harvested into a real catalogue of API services next to other sources of data, (geographical web)services, … So that in a portal you can search for anything, using the metadata, and then getting the answer (for example) to use an API.

Thank you in advance!

Geraldine

2

Hi Geraldine,

Unpacking your question, I think you’re asking about discovery of APIs via portal-search from the reference documentation. Is that fair?

SmartDocs leverages the OpenAPI Specification (and technically WADL too, though like the industry, we’re moving toward OpenAPI). The API reference documentation that is generated from the spec is indexed just like the rest of the content hosted on a Drupal-based developer portal. This is one of the shining examples of what SmartDocs does particularly well, since it sees the API reference very much like it sees other content on the portal.

No, we do no use thesauri or vocabularies, though that does sound interesting and would love to hear any ideas you have for how that would improve results.