APIcon

11 Feb 2015 by Jonathan Raper

We were at APIcon a few weeks back. A conference run by ProgrammableWeb for people developing APIs. Lots of great talks and conversations, and we learned a lot about the latest API design principles and best practices. We’re hoping to apply some of this to TransportAPI. I also presented at the conference, giving a run through of the story of how TransportAPI was developed, and some of the challenges we’ve faced:

Note: My Libreoffice slides got a little mangled in the video editing process (and I’m not sure where they got that first slide from!).

Our API has grown over time, as we incorporated a variety of datasets from UK transport industry sources. We’ve limited ourselves to open data sources, and some of these are extremely challenging datasets to work with. We’ve had to take a pragmatic approach to design and development, bringing data in, discarding some of the detail, and aligning formats, so that we can offer cleaner data outputs. As I described in the talk, it’s been quite an adventure.

See our API outputs for yourself. Head over to the developer portal and sign up for an API key.

TransportAPI