New APIs: Printing and US Gov Documents

John Musser, July 5th, 2007

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A quick update on a couple of the newer API additions to our directory, the first as a way to extend web-based printing and the second as a means to access over 300,000 US government documents.

• Tabblo: A suite of simple developer tools from HP for making web sites more printable. This initial release provides a templating engine that allows web pages to be re-formatted for better printing.
• LOUIS: A collection of about 300,000 Federal Government documents, scraped daily from the Government Printing Office website, GPO Access. This API is a web framework for accessing the collection. Essentially, you can pass filtering parameters to document feeds, and receive results in XML syndication format. The overall scheme is based on Google’s GData API. This is another very useful API created thanks to the support of the Sunlight Foundation. A good earlier example is the Follow the Money API from the Institute on Money in State Politics.