Along with the growth of industry level API events for machine learning, healthcare, and beyond, I’m starting to see the emergence of more API specific working groups, something I’ve been asking for, for some time now. The API universe is expanding and we will need API specialists with domain expertise to help push forward the conversations in leading industries like healthcare, banking, education, transportation, and beyond.
I’ve been keeping an eye out for any movement within industries beyond FHIR and PSD2, and now I”m adding three more efforts to my list:
- Artificial Intelligence - NTT DOCOMO’s new docomo AI Agent Open Partner Initiative to facilitate collaborative development of all-new offerings implemented with a service-agnostic, device-agnostic speech interface based on AI Agent API, a newly developed artificial intelligence (AI) application programming interface (API) that DOCOMO plans to incorporate into a new AI agent service to be launched in early fiscal 2018.
- Payments - The National Automated Clearing House Association (NACHA) API Industry Standardization Group looking to “help improve the safety and transparency of transactions, increase efficiencies and speed of communications, and enhance support of payments innovations.”
- Hospitality - The Hospitality Technology Next Generation (HTNG) API Registry looking to address a number of inefficiencies in the Hospitality API space, including finding potential technology partners whose products and/or services that could add value to an hotelier’s offerings, by creating a registry of Hospitality API’s to help modernize this space.
These three efforts provide some interesting models for how companies and existing industry organizations are stepping up to provide leadership when it comes to API definitions, standards, and discovery in a particular business sector. There are no signs of whether these organizations will get off the ground and become sustainable, or that their stewards understand the wider API space, and have their industries best interest in mind. It does provide us with a glimpse at what is coming though, and the opportunity for companies, organizations, institutions, and government agencies to step up and take the lead when it comes to API standards.
I am taking my Open Referral Human Services API work which helps lead the discussion around the 211 API standard, while also looking to help my friend Phil Ashlock move forward the Open311 standard in a similar fashion. These are community efforts that are looking to help standardize how municipal agencies and organizations share information. I’m hoping to take this work, and merge with what I’m seeing in other industries and eventually establish a blueprint that anyone looking to start an API standards organization can take and put to work–hopefully, it is something that will forkable and deployable using Github like any API project should be.