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?
Our directory lists 216 mashups under the real estate category. While these mashups provide their own take on browsing and evaluating real estate listings, several of them lack critical school data, which is an important part of a family’s housing decision. Education.com plans to change all of that via its API.
Short is the new long. Twitter keeps you to 140 characters, which means sometimes you have to cut things short. Help make sense of the acronyms with the Abbreviations API (our our Abbreviations API profile). Pass a term and receive its many meanings, along with the context where each meaning is used.
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