Ebook: Description Discovery and Profiles - The Next Level in Web APIs

NY: InfoQ, 2015. — 49 p.
This eMag focuses on three key areas of “meta-language” for Web APIs: API Description, API Discovery, and API Profiles.
You’ll see articles covering all three of these important trends as well as interviews with some of the key personalities in this fast-moving space. API description languages and utilities have been around since the Interface Description Language (IDL) era of the 1980s and 90s. Now we have formats like Swagger, RAML, and Apiary Blueprint as the most popular in the field of Web APIs.
API discovery work — finding an API to meet your needs — is primarily a human-driven search, select, and on-boarding process today. However, enterprise-level tooling such as Zoo-Keeper, Consul, and etcd are pointing the way toward automating much of that process. Finally, API profiles have emerged from the quiet land of library and information science into the world of APIs for the Web. This is a very new field but a few vendors are already taking a look at the possibility of supporting API Profiles today.