Mashup Camp - Standard model for describing APIs

Paul Martino and I had our WSFinder hats on for a really good discussion at Mashup Camp with John Musser from Programmable Web and Dave from Strike Iron.

What we decided to was agree on a common data format that we could put metadata about APIs in. We wanted to keep it as lightweight as possible so that people would use it and allow for portability of the informatino across of all our sites.

Would love readers feedback about what they think will work and if we're missing anything!

API/RSS format

• Title
• Keywords/Tags
• Free/Pay/Non-Commercial
• Description
• URL (For info)

Comments

[Padraig O'hIceadha]

I'd recommend that you look at extending DOAP (http://usefulinc.com/doap/ - an existing standard for describing open source projects) rather than creating something totally new. There are lots of existing tools and services which already understand DOAP which would help to speed adoption.

It is an RDF vocabulary, but can be expressed in XML or microformats (hDoap) also.

There's a description of the vocabulary at http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-osproj3/
It has title, licence (covers free/pay/non-commercial), description, homepage (info URL). You can apply multiple categories which could be used to model tags/keywords. And it has lots of other useful concepts, like maintainer. mailing list, bug database etc.