It can certainly be stressful to move into a new home and even more stressful if you don’t know the city well that you are moving to. Trying to find a location within a city that has good schools, low crime, and inhabitants that share your lifestyle is usually a priority. Thankfully, PicketReport aggregates all of this information into an easy to use website that makes evaluating locations a lot easier. There’s also a PicketReport Lifestyle API to make the information programmatic.
Our API directory now includes 84 education APIs. The newest is the CollegiateLink API. The most popular, in terms of mashups, is the DonorsChoose API. We list 10 DonorsChoose mashups. Below you’ll find some more stats from the directory, including the entire list of education APIs.
RhymeBrain is a service made to help writers, or anyone else for that matter, find rhymes for words, make new portmanteaus, and alliterate well. When writing with figurative language, or writing poems, such a tool can be very helpful for a writer who’s currently stuck. It might also be helpful for such things as computer generated literature, but for that, you’d want a robust API with full access to the database. Well, you’re in luck, because it does indeed exist.
Wikimapia is a web service that allows users to edit information on a world map in a wiki format. Users of the site can add places, edit them, and get the information previous users have entered. The info there is currently pretty sparse, but the service is rather new. The company also recently released a Wikimapia API that supports getting information from the web service.
InfoChimps, those enterprising primates, have another incredibly interesting dataset to offer up to the world: 60,000+ UFO Sightings. And you thought that they didn’t exist! Now you’re going to have to apologize to the believers that you mocked because this dataset has come to set the record straight. Aliens exist and the evidence is the InfoChimps Datasets API, which makes searchable every documented sighting.
Open APIs are being adopted by a wide range of industries, even those outside the Internet sector. Most recently the pharmaceutical industry is realizing the benefits of APIs in sharing information around drug research. Thomson Reuters now provides the Thomson Reuters Pharma API for investigational drugs data. The service provides access the company’s comprehensive source of global pharmaceutical intelligence on drugs.
Lawyers and Doctors have a special place in our society. Most of us need them at some time or the other. Avvo is a directory focused on lawyers and doctors, allowing us to search them based on their area, expertise, user ratings and other criteria. Now its Avvo API provides the same functionality to your applications.
If you are into developing word games and have been scouting around for both a word database and an API to go with to make things easier, Wordnik may just have delivered the solution for you. The online dictionary’s latest version of its Wordnik API is squarely targeting word game developers by giving them additional methods that will help them find words with a great degree of control.
Sometimes it takes a little human intervention to make semantic applications easier to build. The Guardian newspaper has augmented its Open Platform API with unique identifiers for bands and books. In turn, the company has simplified the process of creating a mashup that uses multiple sources to focus on a single work, which may help its content spread farther.
One of the most valuable resources of the english language is the dictionary. I won’t get into the history of the dictionary or what it’s done for literal society. I will note that incorporating inline definitions into reading apps is not the easiest thing to do. Sure, we now have eReaders like Apple’s iBooks and the Amazon Kindle that have dictionary integration built in, but what about the rest of of the text-based universe?
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