about.html

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title: About The API Stack
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<h1 class="title">About The API Stack</h1>
<p><img src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/kinlane-productions/bw-icons/bw-stacks.png" align="right" width="200" style="padding: 15px" /></p>
<p>The API Stack is all about pushing forward my work around API discovery. I envision a world where we can find exactly the APIs we need for any job. To accomplish this, I feel strongly that we need to move past the conversation being on quantity of APIs, and more about the quality of APIs, organized into exactly the stacks we need to accomplish specific objectives.</p>

<p>As part of my API Evangelist research and monitoring, I keep track on over 500 companies, and the APIs they expose. The quantity of companies, and the number of APIs changes weekly, as I further refine the listings, and provide better detail into how each company operates. To manage my API Stack, I use <a href="http://apisjson.org">APIs.json</a>, which allows me to be as flexible as possible when I am profiling each company, while also making sure everything is machine readable by default, and available in a single coherent collection.</p>

<p>You can access all APIs profiled in the <a href="http://theapistack.com/apis.json">APIs.json file for the API Stack</a>. From there, you will find an include link to each company that I profile, individual APIs.json file--which you can view with the APIs.json viewer, just by clicking on the {"A"} logo used throughout the website. I focus on profiling the technical, business, and political properties for each API, across all companies I profile, which ultimately feeds into better API discovery.</p>

<p>You can access all of the APIs.json, and supporting Swagger files for all the APIs <a href="https://github.com/kinlane/api-stack/tree/gh-pages/data">under the /data folder in the Github repository for the website</a>. Not all APIs have Swagger specifications, but when they do, you'll find them listed as a property for each API. Feel free to fork the repository, and access any of the data listed, just make sure and contribute back when you fix errors, or add any missing data. It is something I will updating in real-time so you are best to fork, and stay in sync.</p>

<p>Once I get this current stack profiled, I will work on other tools for editing <a href="http://apisjson.org">API.json files</a>, and remix other collections, using the companies, and their APIs that I have indexed here as part of the API Stack. I feel pretty strongly that <a href="http://apievangelist.com/2014/12/21/making-sure-the-most-important-layers-of-api-space-stay-open/">this layer of the API space has to remain open, accessible, and machine readable</a> if we are going to get to achieve the safest, secure, and most successful possible version of the API economy we all can imagine.</p>