APIs for open data Access

Last December, the Congress of Deputies approved Royal Decree-Law 24/2021, which included the transposition of Directive (EU) 2019/1024 on open data and the reuse of public sector information. This Royal Decree amends Law 37/2007 on the reuse of public sector information, including new requirements for public bodies, including facilitating access to high-value data. 

High-value data are data whose reuse is associated with considerable benefits to society, the environment and the economy. Initially, the European Commission highlighted as high-value data those belonging to the categories of geospatial, environmental, meteorological, statistical, societal and mobility data, although these classes can be extended both by the Commission and by the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Digital Transformation through the Data Office. According to the Directive, this type of data "shall be made available for reuse in a machine-readable format, through appropriate application programming interfaces and, where appropriate, in the form of bulk download". In other words, among other things, an API is required.

What is an API?

An application programming interface or API is a set of definitions and protocols that enable the exchange of information between systems. It should be noted that there are different types of APIs based on their architecture, communication protocols and operating systems.

APIs offer a number of advantages for developers, since they automate data and metadata consumption, facilitate mass downloading and optimize information retrieval by supporting filtering, sorting and paging functionalities. All of this results in both economic and time savings. 

In this sense, many open data portals in our country already have their own APIs to facilitate access to data and metadata. In the following infographic you can see some examples at national, regional and local level, including information about the API of datos.gob.es. The infographic also includes brief information on what an API is and what is needed to use it.

Click here to see the infographic in full size and in its accessible version

These examples show the effort that public agencies in our country are making to facilitate access to the information they keep in a more efficient and automated way, in order to promote the reuse of their open data. 

 In datos.gob.es we have a Practical Guide for the publication of open data using APIs where a series of guidelines and good practices are detailed to define and implement this mechanism in an open data portal.

Content prepared by the datos.gob.es team.