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APIs transforming digital content strategy at federal agencies, says government panel [EMBIN (Emerging Markets Business Information News](EMBIN (Emerging Markets Business Information News) Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) Several government officials recently said that application programming interfaces, or APIs, are allowing federal agencies to provide and share more services and data quickly and easily without requiring a larger workforce. APIs are the future, they really are, said Dennis Alvord, executive director of BusinessUSA at the Commerce Department. He was one of several experts who spoke about APIs Oct. 27 at the Executive Leadership Conference in Williamsburg, Va., an annual conference sponsored by industry group ACT-IAC. With APIs, agencies craft applications that reuse and repurpose information already available across government in a user-centric way. For instance, when BusinessUSA launched a little over two years ago it had 150 pieces of content, and today it has more than 7,000 pieces of content, he said, adding he has only nine people who work for the program. Without APIs, we would drown in content, he said. Alvord's team populates the site by pulling in related feeds from standardized content such as an aggregated events feed that's already been created by a number of agencies. Many, many, many federal agencies offer events, training, workshops to businesses, but you have to go [from] individual website to individual website to locate them, he said. Not only do APIs allow these events to be pulled into a single events calendar, there's an application on the site that makes these events searchable by zip code. The Health and Human Services Department is similarly using APIs for content syndication. With APIs, several HHS agencies are aggregating their information on smoking cessation into a single feed, which state and county health departments can also embed on their websites, said Lakshmi Grama, acting associate director of digital communications at the National Cancer Institute. Think about a small health department in a county in Ohio with two people who are actually doing everything. Smoking cessation is a very small part of their work. But smoking cessation has a big impact, said Grama. Technology enables these kinds of partnerships. APIs also allow agencies to close the gap between what they're able to deliver and what consumers expect, said Nicole Stillwell, deputy chief of new media and the State Department's bureau of consular affairs. The effect of technology is that it means we're always a couple steps behind what the public actually wants, she said, but she added that there are workarounds. [We're] doing things like opening up our data and developing APIs so that the public can take our information and use it in a way they want to see it, said Stillwell, who added that the department is creating web or mobile applications to make this happen. (c) 2014 EMBIN (Emerging Markets Business Information News) Provided by SyndiGate Media Inc. (Syndigate.info). |