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Announcing the New OpenAPI Initiative Special Interest Group for Travel

By Announcement, Blog

Join OpenTravel and the OpenAPI Initiative Travel Workgroup on July 22, 2020, as we bring the focus to the European traveller. Click here to get the Zoom invite. To get all the latest updates and announcements, please click here and sign up for regular updates!

The travel industry relies on APIs. Connecting business among diverse industries like travel, tourism and hospitality, and representing an incredible array of companies that need to efficiently communicate and relay electronic information includes airlines, car rental firms, hotels, tour operators, travel agencies, technology companies and many more. 

With this in mind, the OpenAPI Initiative is creating a Travel Special Interest Group (SIG) to support the adoption of APIs and facilitate the digital transformation throughout the travel industry. 

The OpenAPI TravelSIG mission is to “enable and nurture the growth of API adoption, development and developers throughout the travel vertical through promotion of the OpenAPI Initiative.” It will meet as needed to discuss common challenges and solutions with the travel space as well as provide a single, unified voice in coordinating with the OAI’s technical steering committee as well as form on an ad hoc basis by request from the TSC, TOB or the BGB as requested by any of those bodies.

The Travel SIG will designate a point of contact to communicate with the governing board and other bodies within OpenAPI as needed.

Participation in the Travel SIG will be open to any member of the OAI. Participation from non-members – we like to say “soon-to-be members!” –  will be allowed on a case-by-case basis to provide relevant subject matter expertise and help serve as an outreach opportunity to bring on new members and adopters for OpenAPI Initiative.

Please join the Travel SIG! Click here to get the Zoom invite for the next meeting on July 22, 2020, and here and sign up for regular updates!

OpenAPI Welcomes the OpenTravel Alliance as New Member

By Announcement, Blog


OpenAPI welcomes the OpenTravel Alliance as its newest member!

OpenTravel is a not-for-profit trade association that develops data messaging structures in order to facilitate communication between the many facets of the travel industry. It is the travel industry’s only open-source, interoperability data standard. Using OpenTravel messaging, travelers can search, book, pay and check-in/out in a completely contactless environment.

“We see solid strategic alignment between the mission of OpenTravel Alliance and that of the OpenAPI Initiative,” said Jeff ErnstFriedman, Executive Director at OpenTravel Alliance. “We share a goal of promoting open standards in the API economy and OAI is the nexus for all aspects of generating an API marketplace. We are looking forward to bringing the voice of the travel industry to the 2020 API Specifications Conference being held Sept 9 – 10.”

Tens of thousands of OpenTravel messaging structures are currently in use. The open source standard encompass air, rail, cruise, golf, tour packages, ground transportation, hotel and car rentals. The organization got its start using an XML messaging system, but has since made OpenTravel Messaging available in JSON, WSDL and OpenAPI Spec. 

To help the travel industry adapt to COVID-19, OpenTravel has rolled out a new COVID protocol messaging system. In the upcoming release OpenTravel messaging will include capabilities that allow travel companies to take advantage of the pent-up demand and increase revenue.

“Our technology allows for interoperability between suppliers that will increase revenue opportunities and decrease technology costs,” ErnstFriedman said. “The interoperability component of OpenTravel Messaging will allow for a seamless traveler experience that will reduce physical touchpoints and expedite the movement of travelers throughout their journey.” 

“OpenTravel Alliance is an exciting addition to the OpenAPI Initiative,” said Marsh Gardiner, Product Manager, Google Cloud, and Technical Steering Committee member, OpenAPI Initiative. “Standardizing how APIs are described to streamline development makes good sense for many different industries, and travel in particular can benefit.” 

OpenAPI Resources

To learn more about how to participate in the evolution of the OpenAPI Specification: https://www.openapis.org/participate/how-to-contribute

About the OpenAPI Initiative

The OpenAPI Initiative (OAI) was created by a consortium of forward-looking industry experts who recognize the immense value of standardizing on how APIs are described. As an open governance structure under the Linux Foundation, the OAI is focused on creating, evolving and promoting a vendor neutral description format. The OpenAPI Specification was originally based on the Swagger Specification, donated by SmartBear Software. To get involved with the OpenAPI Initiative, please visit https://www.openapis.org

About Linux Foundation 

Founded in 2000, the Linux Foundation is supported by more than 1,000 members and is the world’s leading home for collaboration on open source software, open standards, open data, and open hardware. Linux Foundation projects like Linux, Kubernetes, Node.js and more are considered critical to the development of the world’s most important infrastructure. Its development methodology leverages established best practices and addresses the needs of contributors, users and solution providers to create sustainable models for open collaboration. For more information, please visit us at linuxfoundation.org.

The API Specifications Conference (ASC 2020) – Hold the dates: Sept 9th-10th

By Announcement, Events

Mark your calendar for the return of this year’s API Specifications Conference (ASC)! This year we will be holding an all-digital event on September 9th and 10th, 9 am – 2 pm Pacific time. Join from the comfort of your own home—no hotels, no airfare, no line for the restroom.  

ASC 2020 includes keynotes, sessions, and breakouts on specifications and standards behind the cutting edge technologies that chart the future of APIs. Look forward to in-depth, forward looking and tutorial sessions on API specifications and standards including OpenAPI Specification, gRPC, AsyncAPI, GraphQL, RAML, API Blueprint, OData, JSON Schema, and others. In-depth discussions will not only enable attendees to get familiar with these specifications and standards, but actually use them in practice.

Registration and the Call for Talks are both open as of now: 

* Register at: http://www.cvent.com/d/pnqcfc/4W?ct=50221cf5-5496-4c34-9ec0-3b52b1bf1204

* Submit your talk at: https://sessionize.com/api-specifications-conference-2020/

* Submissions deadline: July 2

* ASC 2020 conference: Sept 9th-10th

Please mark these dates in your calendar and sharpen your pencils to submit a talk proposal. We’re looking forward to your proposals and participation that will make ASC 2020 a great event again this year.  If your company is interested in sponsoring the event please reach out to ascsponsorships@linuxfoundation.org for our sponsorship prospectus.

OpenAPI Initiative Welcomes Bloomberg as Newest Member

By Announcement, Blog

OpenAPI Initiative continues fast pace of membership growth; Bloomberg joins 38 current members that include Atlassian, eBay, Google, Microsoft, Red Hat, SmartBear, and many more

SAN FRANCISCO – April 14, 2020 – The OpenAPI Initiative, the consortium of forward-looking industry experts focused on creating, evolving and promoting the OpenAPI Specification (OAS), a vendor-neutral, open description format for RESTful APIs, is announcing today that Bloomberg has joined as a new member.

As a global leader in business and financial information, data, news and analytics, Bloomberg believes that standardizing Web APIs throughout the financial industry will provide consistency and value across the global capital markets ecosystem. Bloomberg sees the advantages of implementing the OpenAPI Specification to improve time to market, shorten development lifecycles, and reduce implementation costs.

“Bloomberg is excited to join the OpenAPI Initiative, where we’ll have the opportunity to help shape the OpenAPI Specification and its role in the global financial industry,” said Richard Norton, Head, Data License Engineering Group at Bloomberg. “As our enterprise customers are increasingly looking to access our data feeds to power their in-house analytics and trading applications, we are confident that the OpenAPI Specification will enable them to seamlessly manage their Bloomberg data. Plus, the entire industry will benefit from our involvement in the standard’s governance process as we’ll be able to take their learnings and contribute back to future iterations of the de facto standard for describing Web APIs.”

“We are excited to welcome Bloomberg to the OpenAPI Initiative. Major corporations are taking advantage of the OpenAPI Spec for a simple reason: developer productivity. Instead of producing SDKs, organizations can produce OpenAPI specs, and then generate their SDKs in any language they’d like to use, immediately benefitting their customers,” said Marsh Gardiner, Product Manager, Google, and Technical Steering Committee, OpenAPI Initiative. “We see firsthand business and technical productivity wins when organizations use the OpenAPI Spec. Bloomberg has embraced open source, and the benefits for their enterprise customers managing Bloomberg data is immense.”

Hundreds of software engineers across Bloomberg’s global engineering workforce have provided code, documentation, tests, or other improvements to open source projects. In areas relevant to Bloomberg’s infrastructure needs, Bloomberg engineers have become project leaders and committers. To find out more about Bloomberg’s open source activities: https://www.TechAtBloomberg.com

OpenAPI Resources

To learn more about participate in the evolution of the OpenAPI Specification: https://www.openapis.org/participate/how-to-contribute

●   Become a Member

●   OpenAPI Specification Twitter

●   OpenAPI Specification GitHub – Get started immediately!

●   Share your OpenAPI Spec v3 Implementations

About the OpenAPI Initiative

The OpenAPI Initiative (OAI) was created by a consortium of forward-looking industry experts who recognize the immense value of standardizing on how APIs are described. As an open governance structure under the Linux Foundation, the OAI is focused on creating, evolving and promoting a vendor neutral description format. The OpenAPI Specification was originally based on the Swagger Specification, donated by SmartBear Software. To get involved with the OpenAPI Initiative, please visit https://www.openapis.org

About Linux Foundation

Founded in 2000, the Linux Foundation is supported by more than 1,000 members and is the world’s leading home for collaboration on open source software, open standards, open data, and open hardware. Linux Foundation projects like Linux, Kubernetes, Node.js and more are considered critical to the development of the world’s most important infrastructure. Its development methodology leverages established best practices and addresses the needs of contributors, users and solution providers to create sustainable models for open collaboration. For more information, please visit us at linuxfoundation.org.

Interzoid Joins the OpenAPI Initiative to Help Build Frictionless Data Future

By Announcement, Blog

OpenAPI welcomes Interzoid as a new OpenAPI member!

“We are excited to be a part of accelerating the adoption of a standard that we believe will play a central role in the upward march of the API Economy. The fast and easy movement of valuable data around the Web, combined with our data asset improvement API offerings, is greatly enhanced by leveraging the OpenAPI Specification,” said Robert Brauer, Interzoid, CEO. “As someone who has been working with APIs for nearly two decades, I think the OpenAPI Specification is one of the more attractive and useful innovations yet.”

Interzoid was founded in 2019 and has built their software stack on open source technology, including Linux, Angular, the Go programming language, and PostgreSQL. Interzoid provides 20+ APIs that provide services like generated similarity keys to match disparate data sets using their City Match API, Full Name Match API, Company Match API, and more. Interzoid is looking to build future open source projects that support the company strategy of frictionless data.

“We are excited to welcome Interzoid as a new member of the OpenAPI Initiative,” said Marsh Gardiner, Product Manager, Google Cloud, and Technical Steering Committee member, OpenAPI Initiative. “Interzoid has used the OpenAPI 3.0 Specification format to formally describe all of their APIs. The specification is a great way to help developers quickly evaluate and understand the details of the services they’re providing.”

List of Interzoid APIs Available: https://www.interzoid.com/services

OpenAPI Resources

To learn more about participate in the evolution of the OpenAPI Specification: https://www.openapis.org/participate/how-to-contribute

About the OpenAPI Initiative

The OpenAPI Initiative (OAI) was created by a consortium of forward-looking industry experts who recognize the immense value of standardizing on how APIs are described. As an open governance structure under the Linux Foundation, the OAI is focused on creating, evolving and promoting a vendor neutral description format. The OpenAPI Specification was originally based on the Swagger Specification, donated by SmartBear Software. To get involved with the OpenAPI Initiative, please visit https://www.openapis.org

About Linux Foundation 

Founded in 2000, the Linux Foundation is supported by more than 1,000 members and is the world’s leading home for collaboration on open source software, open standards, open data, and open hardware. Linux Foundation projects like Linux, Kubernetes, Node.js and more are considered critical to the development of the world’s most important infrastructure. Its development methodology leverages established best practices and addresses the needs of contributors, users and solution providers to create sustainable models for open collaboration. For more information, please visit us at linuxfoundation.org.

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The Blue Button API Will Be At APIStrat In Nashville Next Week

By Announcement, Blog

APIs are pushing forward the conversation in almost every business sector today, but one of the more important areas we are seeing across the landscape is coming out of the federal government with the Blue Button API out of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). We’d like to invite you to Nashville next week to learn more about the API efforts coming out of CMS, and how they are making an impact on healthcare in this country with APIs.

We are please to have Mark Scrimshire (@ekivemark) of NewWave Telecoms and Technologies, who is the Blue Button Innovator and Developer Evangelist for the CMS program. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) Blue Button API enables Medicare beneficiaries to connect their Medicare claims data to the applications, services, and research programs they trust through a suite of services, enabling:

– a developer to register a beneficiary-facing application
– a beneficiary to grant an application access to four years of their Part A, B, and D claims data

Providing API access to a platform that has the potential to reach 44 million beneficiaries, or 15 percent of the U.S. population who are enrolled in the Medicare program. Representing a pretty significant shift in how we think about the delivery of healthcare in this country. One of the most significant aspects of the Blue Button API when it comes to the wider API conversation, is their adoption of the HL7 FHIR standard in conjunction with OAuth 2.0 to provide access to the platform, setting the stage for a conversation around arguably the most important API definition available across the API sector today.

Join us Tuesday, September 25, at 10:00 AM, for a keynote from Mark Scrimshire about the Blue Button API, sharing the story of some of the successes and challenges with standing up the API platform. Mr. Scrimshire is just one of the can’t miss talks going on in Nashville next week. There are still tickets left, so make sure you get yours today, and do not miss out on the API conversation that is going on at APIStrat this year.

A Shout Out to the APIStrat Steering and Program Committees

By Announcement, Blog

We are getting ready to close the APIStrat call for papers next week and we wanted to take a moment to give a shout out to the amazing lineup we’ve assembled as part of the steering committee, who are helping guide the event. As well as the folks on the program committee who will be helping review the talks submitted as part of the CFP process, and ultimately craft the program. These are the people who will help set the tone for the conversation that occurs at APIStrat in Nashville, and we are very pleased to have them helping out.

Here are the members of the APIStrat steering committee, playing different leadership roles in the conference, making sure everything gets done by September:

Steering Committee

Next up, we nineteen folks on the program committee who you will have to WOW with your talk submissions so that you can get on stage at APIStrat in Nashville:

Program Committee

Thank you so much to everyone involved. It takes a lot of work to pull together an event like this. Everyone involved is participating because they believe in the event, as well as the health of the wider API community. Once again, we feel like we have assembled a pretty amazing lineup of folks to help make sure APIStrat adequately represents the community, coming from a diverse range of companies delivering APIs and services to the sector.

While the primary roles for the event are filled, there are still plenty of opportunities to get involved. First, make sure you have submitted your talk–you only have one week left to get it in. Second, there are sponsorship opportunities available, and we need the financial support of the API community to be able to make the event happen again. Feel free to reach out, and we’ll see what we can do to get you involved, and part of the goings on in Nashville this year. Thanks again to our steering and program committee members, and we’ll see you all in September.

Open API Initiative to Present at the Open Source Summit Europe

By Announcement, Uncategorized

IBM and SmartBear, two founding members of the Open API Initiative will join SAP, one of our newest members, on stage at the Open Source Summit – Europe for a panel discussion: If APIs are like Snowflakes, How Do You Make them More “Standardized” – or Do You?

The OAI invites you to join this panel discussion to hear from industry leaders about the origins of the OpenAPI community, and the details of the new OAS v3.0.0 specification release, and the value of open community collaboration related to API development.

Register for the OSS Europe: OSS is a technical conference where 2,000+ developers, operators, and community leadership professionals convene to collaborate, share information and learn about the latest in open technologies, including Linux, containers, cloud computing and more. 

APIs form the connecting glue between modern applications and are used to connect third-party data services, public/private data sources, and other applications.

The Open API Initiative (OAI) came together over two years ago to seek to create, evolve, and promote an open description format for API services that is vendor-neutral, portable, and evolves under shared governance.

On August 7, the OAI announced the release of the OpenAPI Spec v3, completing a 7 month community effort. Born out of the world’s most popular framework for APIs, the prior version has over 18K daily downloads, over 3k know public GitHub repos, and 44 targets in codegen from over 250 contributors.

 

Meet the Panelists

Jeff Borek
Moderator
WW Program Director, Open Technology & Developer Advocacy, Digital Business Group at IBM
Erin McKean
Panelist
Developer Advocate at IBM
Ole Lensmar
Panelist
Chief Architect at SmartBear Software | OAI Chair
Harsh Jegadeesan
Panelist
Head of Product Management, Digital Transformation Services SAP Cloud Platform

New Collaborative Project to Extend Swagger Specification for Building Connected Applications and Services

By Announcement

The Linux Foundation will host new Open API Initiative with initial contributions from SmartBear and founding members 3Scale, Apigee, Capital One, Google, IBM, Intuit, Microsoft, PayPal and Restlet
SAN FRANCISCO, November 5, 2015 – The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux and collaborative development, today is announcing the Open API Initiative. Founding members of the Open API Initiative include 3Scale, Apigee, Capital One, Google, IBM, Intuit, Microsoft, PayPal, Restlet and SmartBear.

The Initiative will extend the Swagger specification and format to create an open technical community within which members can easily contribute to building a vendor neutral, portable and open specification for providing metadata for RESTful APIs. This open specification will allow both humans and computers to discover and understand the capabilities of the respective services with a minimal amount of implementation logic. The Initiative will also promote and facilitate the adoption and use of an open API standard.

“Swagger is considered one of the most popular frameworks for building APIs. When an open source project reaches this level of maturity, it just can’t be managed by one company, organization or developer,” said Jim Zemlin, executive director at The Linux Foundation. “The Open API Initiative will extend this technology to advance connected application development through open standards.”

Swagger was created in 2010 and offered under an open source license a year later. It is a description format used by developers in industries ranging from consumer electronics to energy, finance, healthcare, government, media and travel to design and deliver APIs that support a range of connected applications and services. With downloads of Swagger and Swagger tooling nearly tripling over the last year, it is considered the most popular open source framework for defining and creating RESTful APIs. SmartBear recently acquired the Swagger API open source project from Reverb Technologies and today is working with its industry peers to ensure the specification and format can be advanced for years to come.

The open governance model for the Open API Initiative includes a Technical Developer Committee (TDC) that will maintain and evolve the specification, as well as engage users for feedback to inform development.

The Open API Initiative is a Linux Foundation Collaborative Project, which are independently funded software projects that harness the power of collaborative development to fuel innovation across industries and ecosystems. By spreading the collaborative DNA of the largest collaborative software development project in history, The Linux Foundation provides the essential collaborative and organizational framework so project hosts can focus on innovation and results. Linux Foundation Collaborative Projects span the enterprise, mobile, embedded and life sciences markets and are backed by many of the largest names in technology. For more information about Linux Foundation Collaborative Projects, please visit: http://collabprojects.linuxfoundation.org/

Member Company Comments

3Scale
“We’ve been firm supporters of Swagger from early on and are excited about the formation of the Linux Foundation OAI and collaboration on the new API definition format,” said Steven Willmott, CEO, 3Scale Inc. “The new format will be a crucial element to the development of the emerging Web of APIs and we’re very much looking forward to contributing to its evolution.”

Apigee
“The API community has rallied around Swagger as the de facto standard for describing and sharing APIs. Independent, open governance under the Linux Foundation is the necessary next step. Apigee is proud to have been a founding member of the Swagger Working Group in 2014, and we are excited to team with our friends across the industry today in carrying on this important work,” said Ed Anuff, SVP Product Strategy, Apigee.

Capital One
“Open source is essential to our development process. It’s a powerful approach that lets people work together to build great solutions while realizing shared benefits,” said Rob Alexander, CIO, Capital One. “We believe that the Open API Initiative will enable the broader community of developers to contribute at unprecedented levels, allowing companies to design and deliver great experiences across industries.”

Google
“Google is committed to open specifications and promoting APIs as a fundamental building block of modern software. We are excited to join the Open API Initiative and to help usher in the next era in connected systems,” said Dan Ciruli, Product Manager, Google Cloud Platform.

IBM
“The open governance and ecosystem support behind the Open API Initiative will help advance common standards across industries,” said Marie Wieck, General Manager, IBM Middleware. “IBM is helping accelerate participation in the API economy and laying the foundation for cognitive business.”

Intuit
“Contributing to the Open API Initiative allows Intuit to help advance an important industry standard and build on years of API development investment,” said Thomas Barnes, Intuit Distinguished Architect. “We are looking forward to working with others in the industry on the initiative to shape the next generation of the specification.”

SmartBear
“Across industries, Swagger has gained incredible adoption for its expressiveness, comprehensive toolchain and vibrant community alike,” said Tony Tam, VP of Products, Swagger at SmartBear and founder of the Swagger open-source project. “Working with both API vendors and consumers, SmartBear sees the value in open governance around the specification which will allow for even more rapid growth and adoption across the API industry, and is honored to donate the Swagger Specification into the Open API Initiative under The Linux Foundation.”

PayPal
“The Open API Initiative will promote standards that will further simplify the integration experience for our developers, and we are pleased to be a part of this important work,” said Deepak Nadig, Head of API & Developer Platform Engineering at PayPal.

Restlet

“Restlet welcomes the creation of the Open API Initiative and looks forward to collaborating with the community on the critical topic of API metadata specifications,” said Jerome Louvel, Chief Geek (CTO) and Founder of Restlet. “It is time for the API community to unite around a common API language that will facilitate the integration between various API tools – open source and commercial. As a vendor, our goal is to simplify the life of API developers and advance API innovation on new fronts. Restlet is committed to supporting specifications from the Open API Initiative in both our open source API framework and our API cloud platform.”

For more information about the Open API Initiative, please visit: openapis.org

For more information on Swagger, visit: http://swagger.io/.

About The Linux Foundation

The Linux Foundation is a nonprofit consortium dedicated to fostering the growth of Linux and collaborative software development. Founded in 2000, the organization sponsors the work of Linux creator Linus Torvalds and promotes, protects and advances the Linux operating system and collaborative software development by marshaling the resources of its members and the open source community. The Linux Foundation provides a neutral forum for collaboration and education by hosting Collaborative Projects, Linux conferences including LinuxCon, and generating original research and content that advances the understanding of Linux and collaborative software development. More information can be found at www.linuxfoundation.org. 

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The Linux Foundation and Linux Standard Base are trademarks of The Linux Foundation. Linux is a trademark of Linus Torvalds.

Media Contact
Jennifer Cloer
The Linux Foundation
503-867-2304
Jennifer@Linuxfoundation.org