api economy
TRANSCRIPT
dans.knaw.nlDANS is een instituut van KNAW en NWO
API economy
Transformation from closed to open innovation
Data Archiving and Network Services (DANS)
Vyacheslav TykhonovSenior Data Scientist
The Hague, 20.09.2016
What is API?
Concept• Application program interface (API) is an interface between different
software systems that allows to facilitate their interaction in the same way as human and computer
• API is the only way to win over the technological disruption
Benefits• API can provide direct programable access to systems and processes inside
of any organisation or company• in the modern world API driven usually means data driven• building APIs is the way to improve any digital ecosystem and continue
development in new agile way, speed up rapid prototyping• organisation’s core assets can be reused, shared, and monetised through
data services offering APIs
Problems
• No integrated approach• Systems should talk to each other in order to share
information across physical and logical boundaries• new development should be driven by increasingly
sophisticated ecosystems and business processes that are supported by complex interactions across multiple endpoints
• very difficult to build efficient communication channels between communities in different digital ecosystems
Vision and concept
• API provides a better way to encapsulate and share information and enable transaction processing between elements in the solution stack
• APIs should be managed like a product—one built on top of a potentially complex technical footprint that includes legacy and third-party systems and data
• Agile (lean) delivery models has put an emphasis on rapid experimentation and development
• Data and services are the currency that will fuel the new API economy
• All connected devices will have inherent internal and external dependencies in underlying data and services
History
Digital ecosystem concept
Credits: Yale Digital Collections Center
Open vs closed innovation
Henry Chesbrough’s Open Innovation: The New Imperative for Creating And Profiting from Technology
Open innovation in the digital ecosystem
• Open innovation is the process by which organizations use both internal and external knowledge to drive and accelerate their internal innovation strategy
• APIs can help companies innovate faster and lead to new products and new customers
• APIs making data available in useful and reusable ways• staying competitive means trade on the insights and services
across your balance sheet• promoting things you already do well and bringing them to
the broadest possible audience both inside of organisation or outside
• API is the key to unlock data values and force internal innovation to make organisation more agile
Open innovation and community engagement
• Social Engagement is the ability to work constructively within and between social groups or individuals to create more resilient and sustainable communities
• Community engagement is a set of communications, interactions and participations of different groups of people excited by the same idea or vision
• API economy will force open innovation to create opportunities that can be seed in communities in order to get even more ideas and values
• new insights can help to build bridge to other communities to combine knowledge from different ecosystems
API Recycling as open innovation
• Communities can benefit from digital ecosystem holding all data and services created before
• there is no need to break everything and create again from scratch• No knowledge can be lost in the future so next generations can benefit from it• saving costs, time and human resources by reusing not developing the same
product every time• Netflix and Uber is a great example of open innovation with Open Data• Analog vs digital content, individual vs shared information• New ideas and knowledge from different fields will force singularity and
community engagement• added value is the transformation from closed commercial restricted values to
publicly open community values• combining of knowledge from different disciplined will force inventions of
something principally new
data and tools mean RESTful API
• REST is acronym for REpresentational State Transfer and stands for architectural style for distributed hypermedia systems (first presented by Roy Fielding in 2000)
• The key abstraction of information in REST is a resource (any information that can be named can be a resource)
• REST uses a resource identifier to identify the particular resource involved in an interaction between components.
• information representation consists of data, metadata describing the data and hypermedia links which can help the clients in transition to next desired state (see Dataverse APIs)
• resource methods to be used to perform the desired transition are forming uniform interface like GET/PUT/POST/DELETE commands in HTTP protocol
Guiding Principles of REST (white paper)
1 Client–server – By separating the user interface concerns from the data storage concerns, we improve the portability of the user interface across multiple platforms and improve scalability by simplifying the server components.2 Stateless – Each request from client to server must contain all of the information necessary to understand the request, and cannot take advantage of any stored context on the server. Session state is therefore kept entirely on the client.3 Cacheable – Cache constraints require that the data within a response to a request be implicitly or explicitly labeled as cacheable or non-cacheable. If a response is cacheable, then a client cache is given the right to reuse that response data for later, equivalent requests.4 Uniform interface – By applying the software engineering principle of generality to the component interface, the overall system architecture is simplified and the visibility of interactions is improved. In order to obtain a uniform interface, multiple architectural constraints are needed to guide the behavior of components. REST is defined by four interface constraints: identification of resources; manipulation of resources through representations; self-descriptive messages; and, hypermedia as the engine of application state.5 Layered system – The layered system style allows an architecture to be composed of hierarchical layers by constraining component behavior such that each component cannot “see” beyond the immediate layer with which they are interacting.6 Code on demand (optional) – REST allows client functionality to be extended by downloading and executing code in the form of applets or scripts. This simplifies clients by reducing the number of features required to be pre-implemented.
Customer Development Methodology in API economy
• developed by serial entrepreneur and business school Professor Steve Blank for startup communities
• the same principles can be applied to different digital ecosystems to force innovation and create added value
• building high level communication layers between participants delivering different stuff to community: vision, ideas, technical solutions and requirements have the same value
• balanced communities form sustainable ecosystems that can help to exchange valuable information with other communities and everybody can benefit from this collaboration
Use case: CLARIAH’s data and tools
• Goal: create overview automatically for data and tools and deliver to the research community to force open innovation
• Process of data collection: Harvesting public datasets from all partners to collect metadata and datasets links (data)
• Software methods: Aggregating activity from CLARIAH github accounts to generate overview of all working packages development (tools)
• Generating RESTful APIs to deliver information on data and tools in the standardised form (JSON) ready for export to other libraries or external discovery services
dans.knaw.nlDANS is een instituut van KNAW en NWO
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