UKOLN is supported by: Technological Innovation in a World of Web APIs Brian Kelly UKOLN University of Bath Bath, UK This work is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 licence (but note caveat) by-nc-sa Acceptable Use Policy Recording/broadcasting of this talk, taking photographs, discussing the content using , instant messaging, blogs, SMS, etc. is permitted providing distractions to others is minimised. Acceptable Use Policy Recording/broadcasting of this talk, taking photographs, discussing the content using , instant messaging, blogs, SMS, etc. is permitted providing distractions to others is minimised. Resources bookmarked using ‘ cetis-2008-apis ' tag

2 About The Facilitators Brian Kelly: UK Web Focus: a national advisory post Long-standing Web evangelist (since Jan 1993) Based at UKOLN, University of Bath, with remit to advise HE/FE and cultural heritage sectors Interests include Web 2.0, standards, accessibility and deployment strategies Marieke Guy: Research officer at UKOLN Recently working on JISC PoWR (Preservation of Web Resource) Currently involved in JISC report on “What Makes a Good API?” Introduction

3 About This Session Title: Technological Innovation in a World of Web APIs Structure: An ‘unconference’ Approach: Some planned sessions; but scope for flexibility Emphasis on your contributions Aims: Explore implications of a development environment based on Web APIs Discuss opportunities and challenges Seek to identify best practices and recommendations Introduction

4 About You (1) How many of you are: Software developers  Develop APIs for use by others  Exploit APIs ‘in the cloud’ JISC employees Work for a JISC Service Work on a JISC-funded project E-learning technologist Manager / policy maker Learner User Other NOTE: You may have multiple roles! Introduction

5 About You (2) In small groups state: Your name and institution What you do What you feel you can contribute to the session What you hope to gain from this session Introduction

6 The Proposed Structure TimeDetailsComments 09.00Introduction to session What’s Happening Now? 09.30Defining Web APIs, cloud, … Examples of usage Why it’s of interest 10.45Tea Break A Vision For The Future 11.15What are the problems? Addressing the problems What should we, JISC, … be doing? 13.00Finish

7 Questions Any questions or comments?

8 What Are We Talking About? We need to define what we are talking about, in order to avoid misunderstandings: Web API: Wikipedia Cloud computing: Wikipedia Software as a Service (SaaS): Wikipedia Platform as a Service (PaaS): Wikipedia Data as a Service (DaaS): Data Management Data Cloud: Semantic Web blog, Paul Miller … Suggestions for definitions invited Definitions OTOH it may be better to avoid a rigourous definition and leave society to arrive at an understanding of the term (cf ‘Web 2.0’)

9 What’s Happening Today? Examples of use of Web APIs invited Examples

10 What Is It Of Interest? Why: Is this session so popular? Why are ‘Web APIs’ so exciting? Why The Interest?

11 What Next? Thoughts for later: Web APIs are of interest? We’ve seen examples of their use But: What are the barriers? What are the best practices? How should we be exploiting Web APIs, the cloud, … in our institutions? What should JISC be doing? What Next?

12 Questions Any questions or comments?