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What is an API and OAI-PMH?

What is an API?

‍API stands for: Application Programming Interface.

APIs are sets of requirements that govern how one application can talk to another. So, whenever you use your laptop, APIs are – more than likely – making it possible to move information between programs.

For more information about what an API is, here are some video guides:

Figshare supports an openly documented API that lets you interact with data in the Figshare platform programmatically. For more information please see read on in this guide.

What is OAI-PMH?

‍This is a service which gives a simple technical option for data providers to make their metadata available to services, based on the open standards HTTP (Hypertext Transport Protocol) and XML (Extensible Markup Language). For more information please visit: https://www.openarchives.org/pmh/

For example, aggregating repositories or services harvest metadata from other sources to display many records all in one place and point users to the original record location. Often, they will use OAI-PMH to harvest the data. An example is the open government data repository for the United States: https://data.gov/

Figshare supports OAI-PMH by providing metadata in standard formats using the OAI-PMH protocol. See further in this guide for details.

If you would like more information, please get in contact by creating a support ticket or emailing us at info@figshare.com, we’d be happy to help!

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