I Am Up To 34 APIs Out Of The Netherlands

As we gear up for API Strategy & Practice in Amsterdam, March 24-26th, I’m spending my time getting to know API companies across Europe. I published a listing of APIs I found from the United Kingdom a few days ago, and next up is taking a look at what APIs are coming out of the Netherlands.

Last week I did a roundup of 17 APIs out of the Netherlands, but thanks to Twitter, and specifically Gerard van Enk (@gvenk) who was curating a spreadsheet of APIs, I was able to double the amount of APIs I'm tracking on out of the country.


Arts Holland

Arts Holland is a consortium of three leading players in the field of arts, culture, new media and tourism. The institutes part of this consortium are the Netherlands Board of Tourism & Conventions, Netherlands Uitburo and Waag Society. Together with organizations in the field of arts, culture, communication, transport, creative industry and technology, a series of tools will be developed that will guide any arts lover through the high-brow cultural landscape Holland has to offer to it’s visitors. The Arts Holland data platform, developer's site and SPARQL tutorial are created and hosted by Waag Society.


BOL.com

The bol.com Open API gives you access to the complete range of the biggest online store in the Netherlands. Use bol.com data into your own concept or application and earn money through the affiliate program bol.com.


CitySDK

The CitySDK Linked Open Data Distribution API is a linked data distribution platform. Developed by Waag Society, the distribution API is a component of the CitySDK toolkit. This toolkit supports the development of open and interoperable interfaces for open data and city services in eight European cities (Amsterdam, Helsinki, Manchester, Lisbon, Istanbul, Lamia, Rome and Barcelona).


Cloudspeakers

The Cloudspeakers API is a REST API and makes it possible for developers to access the data of Cloudspeakers. Cloudspeakers tries to match all found reviews, audio and video files to the MusicBrainz database. MusicBrainz is a community music metadatabase that attempts to create a comprehensive music information site.


Democracy API

The Democracy API enables developers to interact with the Democracy web site programmatically. It's designed to make it possible for anyone to improve Democracy or integrate Democracy into other applications. You can develop a Democracy interface for a mobile phone, build a Democracy widget for your blog, or develop an application that makes it easy to post photos to your feed from your iPhone.


Distimo

Distimo has a very clear objective: to make the app market transparent. The company was born out of the frustration of a lack of insights into the performance of apps and the manual work needed to track important metrics. Our goal is to provide the best and most actionable app intelligence for anyone who wants to compete in the app market. Our data-driven team seeks to help developers, brands and financial services companies gain actionable, timely and factual knowledge of what’s happening daily in the global app market.


Drillster

The Drillster API enables any developer to write applications that interact with Drillster. The API is based on the principles of REST, and comes in both an XML and a JSON flavor. Authentication is taken care of by the OAuth 2.0 protocol. Non-commercial use is free of charge, but commercial use requires prior arrangement.


Dutch Parliament

Digitization of collections creates new opportunities for cooperation. Are you interested in offering collections of KB through your own online channels? Want your digital collection enrich our datasets?


Dutch Schools

The educational system in the Netherlands is complex, and many public bodies are tasked with keeping schools and students on the right track. However, data regarding this task is made available to the general public in a way it is not easily processable, which makes checks by the public (and press) more difficult. The OpenOnderwijs API alleviates this problem by providing a unified interface to data on education collected from several institutions with different responsibilities with regard to the Dutch educational system, such as DUO, Onderwijsinspectie and Vensters voor Verantwoording. The OpenOnderwijs API is built on open source technology, such as Scrapy for scraping school data (the scrapers can be found at Github), Sphinx for the documentation, and ElasticSearch for efficient data storage and retrieval. Also, all school addresses are geocoded using the BAG42 service, an Dutch initiative aiming to integrate high quality, official data sources with “regular” geocoding.


ElasticSearch

Elasticsearch is on a mission to organize data and make it easily accessible. The company delivers the world’s the most advanced open source search and analytics engine available and make real-time data exploration available to anyone. By having a laser focus on achieving the best user experience imaginable, Elasticsearch has become one of the most popular and rapidly growing open source solutions in the market. Today, Elasticsearch is used by thousands of enterprises in virtually every industry. We take good care of our customers and users, providing production support, development support and training worldwide.


Geosophic

Geosophic is the gaming platform that allows you to get behavior analytics from your players while offering them new engagement triggers in the form of geolocated leaderboards. Geosophic is your ‘neighbourhood arcade’ of the mobile age. Our location based leaderboards allow gamers to show off that they’re the best in their cities, countries as well as the whole world. They also include customized game recommendations (performance advertising) which creates a new monetization channel for the developers


Ikdoe API

The Ikdoe API is a RESTful API. Since ikdoe is all about activities, the only resource we provide through this api is the activity resource. At the moment we only support XML as response format, but might support additional formats in the future.


Incubate

Incubate has launched the Incubate API to make all festival-data available for use in apps, websites or even art created by Incubate-minded developers. The Incubate API is an Ally API, a REST oriented JSON Web Service Interface to communicate with the Ally database. Information about artists, time schedules, venues or the latest festival news can be easily collected using the API.


Layar

Layar B.V. designs and develops mobile phone application. It offers Layar, a mobile augmented browser that provides information on top of the camera display view in various categories, including eating and drinking, entertainment and leisure, games, government, health care, local search and directory services, real estate, retail, schools and universities, social networks and communities, tourism, transportation, and weather.


Mobypicture

Share your adventures instantly with your friends. Mobypicture enables users to share photos, video, text and audio directly to their friends on their favorite social sites like Flickr, Facebook, YouTube, Wordpress, Twitter and many more. Mobypicture supports groups, geolocation and a lot of extra features.


MoneyBird

MoneyBird is an online service providing fast and easy billing. You can create, manage and send invoices, but also manage your contacts, send recurring invoices and manage your expenses. PayPal integration available to enable your contacts to pay even faster!


MovieMeter

The MovieMeter API is a XML-RPC webservice which you can use to retrieve film information in Dutch. This API is not intented to provide a complete set of MovieMeter functionalities, for instance the API doesn't provide operations to log in, vote or place new messages. You are allowed to create a website or application which has a primary goal of showing MovieMeter information. However, you must make it clear that while you're application uses our information, it's not made by MovieMeter. Also don't name your application "MovieMeter" or something similar. The application or website must be free of charge and ads. If you don't comply to these rules, your access to the API could be revoked.


Nimbuzz

Nimbuzz is the free call and messaging app for the connected generation. Nimbuzz combines the powers of the Internet and mobile communications into one, and lets you meet, share and connect with family and friends on any mobile device. Nimbuzz users enjoy the freedom of communicating with friends between any internet enabled device, from mobile to mobile, mobile to PC/Mac and vice versa, harnessing the power of the Internet (Wi-Fi, 3G, 2G, GPRS). With its mobile, Web, Wap and desktop clients, Nimbuzz is available on thousands of the worlds’ most popular devices across all major platforms – Nokia Symbian, iPhone, iPod touch, Android, BlackBerry, J2ME, as well as Windows and Mac desktop computers. Social networks & communities supported by Nimbuzz include, Facebook®, GoogleTalk , Twitter, Yahoo!.


NS API

NS has a large amount of data with information on the planned and actual schedules. We make this information like available to developers with a RESTful API. NS API currently features the following services: Prices, Live departures, Faults and activities, the station list of all stations in the Netherlands including geodata, Travel advice from station to station.


OIPA

OIPA is a framework that provides a rich and usable API for parsing, ingesting, storing and searching IATI standard compliant datasets.


Open Images

Open Images is an open media platform that offers online access to audiovisual archive material to stimulate creative reuse.


Openkvk

openkvk.nl is a database created from a collection of data from various sources including kvk.nl , belastingdienst.nl and rechtspraak.nl . These sources are public and subject to the legal publication and conditions. To get the data from these sources to integrate into this system and make searchable we run daily maintenance queries, and quarterly we refresh the sources completely.


PeerReach

Peerreach is an Amsterdam-based social media startup that provides an influence metric that measures your influence within different areas of expertise. The Peerreach algorithm is similar to the pagerank algorithm that Google uses to identify influential websites.


Postcode API

The Dutch postal codes, addresses and locations, since early 2012 public data. We believe that public data should be accessible via accepted standards. Really open And that everyone has access to that data, and that data can be used. The Postcode API gives you free and easy access to the postcode database of the Land Registry.


React.com

React.com offers web services to connect your web site or mobile application with a continuously growing broad selection of social networks. For quick integration we offer hosted services which will allow you to directly use social network functionality by just adding HTML to your website. No need to ask your users for passwords and profiles, let them register and log in with their social network accounts through social sign-in integration.


ReadSpeaker

ReadSpeaker speech-enables online content on the fly in 35+ languages and 100+ voices. In 1999, ReadSpeaker pioneered the first-ever speech-enabling application for websites. Today, the company provides a portfolio of web-based text-to-speech solutions for websites, mobile sites, mobile apps, RSS feeds, online documents and forms, as well as online campaigns. Its solutions are used by over 5000 corporate, media, government, and nonprofit customers around the world.


Rijksmuseum API

The Rijksmuseum API (Application Programming Interface) is a new, state-of-the-art service for application developers. Using the API allows the Rijksmuseum collection and other content, and (high resolution) images available for use in, for example apps or web applications.


Springest

Springest is a Dutch continuing education service that helps users find and compare courses, books, articles, training courses using search and filter capabilities. The Springest API opens up all of the searchable data from Springest to users. Users can query for training guides, courses, and other content as well as integrate it into programs. The service uses REST calls and returns XML or JSON.


The Wrds API

With Wrds API you can link your own program Wrds . You can let the program then lists Wrds add , view, edit , and remove them . For example, if you want a MSN-bot that you hear derogatory words about you , then you can use this API .


Total Film

Total Film provides developers free access to its movies on TV database through an API. With this, the total supply of television films for today and tomorrow can be obtained. More APIs will be released in the future.


TwitterCounter

 

TwitterCounter is Feedburner for Twitter.

TwitterCounter tracks Twitter users and displays attractive stats to everybody interested. Bloggers can add a simple button displaying the number of Followers they have on Twitter.

Thousands of blogger currently display the TwitterCounter button which links to their personal stats page at Twittercounter.com. All these buttons drive traffic to TwitterCounter which shows simple text ads next to the Twitter stats. This creates a positive feedback loop of increasing members, traffic and ad views.

 


Viewbook

Viewbook exposes an API for 3rd party tools to enhance Viewbook using the Flickr REST style API for it's request and response formats. Viewbook uses Flickr's REST implementation. Requests and responses are the same (with a few minor differences, see below), so you can follow the documentation at Flickr to implement the Viewbook API.


Weather API

This is a very basic JSON API for very basic weather data from the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute. The KNMI offers no simple API for simple data, so I built this one, which scrapes their website. Currently, it only offers a single API call, for the latest weather observations at 36 monitoring stations.


Webservices.nl

Webservices.nl has a mission to raise. Data quality of Dutch companies at the highest level to make this possible, it offers a variety of convenient online data services, which every company cheap and simple data data to validate and enrich.


What I see when I look through these 34 APIs, is a wealth of creative talent exposing their resources as APIs. You have art, museums, images, photos, music and other right brain activity. 

With multiple Paris API events, and a single API event in Madrid so far, I'm very pleased with the types of API conversations going on in Europe, and getting really excited to see who comes together to talk APIs in Amsterdam. 

I’m sure there are still other Dutch API efforts I’m missing, so if you know of any companies with a significant presence in the Netherlands, doing cool stuff with APIs, make sure and let me know@kinlane.