The Open Skills API From Dept of Labor & University of Chicago

We like to talk about the API economy in this space. It is kind of the grand dream of API obsessed, that helps us articulate how big of a deal we think APIs are going to be. We know APIs are going to be big, but in reality, the impact most APIs make don't size up. This is one of the reasons I'm such a big support of APIs in the public sector, as the potential for a positive impact tends to be greater in my opinion.

One of the APIs that has the potential to contribute at the API economy scale is out of a partnership between the Department of Labor and the University of Chicago--the DataAtWork Open Skills API. Providing "a complete and standard data store for canonical and emerging skills, knowledge, abilities, tools, technologies, and how they relate to jobs". Opening up a pretty useful API from their collaborative work to "map the DNA or genome of the U.S. labor market."

The Open Skills API uses Swagger UI for the documentation, which always makes me happy because it means there is an OpenAPI Spec behind, for use in Postman, APIMATIC, and other API solutions. It's a simple, open API, that has some serious potential for use in web, and mobile apps, as well as visualizations, analysis, and other types of applications--making it worthy to add the APIs in my list that I think could actually make an impact at API economy scale.