APIs

API directories¶

• toddmotto/public-apis: a collective list of free JSON APIs
• A list of APIs that don’t require authentication

Language, text, speech, general knowledge¶

• ConceptNet: semantic network containing lots of things computers should know about the world, especially when understanding text written by people (you can also download the data)
• Wordnik: “definitions, example sentences, spelling suggestions, related words like synonyms and antonyms, phrases containing a given word, word autocompletion, random words, words of the day, and more”; it was used, for example, to make @gutendelight
• Google Knowledge Graph Search API: find entities in the Google Knowledge Graph
• The New York Times Semantic API: “list of people, places, organizations and other locations, entities and descriptors that make up the controlled vocabulary used as metadata by The New York Times”
• Wikidata: central storage for the structured data of projects including Wikipedia, Wikivoyage, Wikisource, and others
• Wikimedia REST API: “coherent and low-latency access to Wikimedia content and services”
• Catalogue of Life: online database of the world’s known species of animals, plants, fungi and micro-organisms, available as an API and downloadable data set
• wit.ai: natural language APIs
• Words API: an API for the English language
• AlchemyAPI: text and image analysis tools
• Project Gutenberg: “information about robot access to our pages”
• RiTa: a software toolkit for generative literature
• RhymeBrain.com: Rhyming and Word Information API
• Third Eye Data: TV News Archive chyrons (archive.org)

Face and object recognition¶

• Betaface
• AlchemyVision
• Clarifai
• Sighthound

Art, images¶

• Flickr API
• Unsplash API: free high-resolution photos, see documentation here (also available for direct download at unsplash.com)
• Artsy.net Public API: access to images of historic artwork and related information on artsy.net
• Google Street View Image API (developers.google.com)
• Google Static Maps API (developers.google.com)
• The New York Public Library Digital Collections API

Music¶

• Hooktheory – next chord probabilities and songs containing a chord progression

Location and weather¶

• OpenStreetMap API: editing API for fetching and saving raw geodata from/to the OpenStreetMap database
• OpenWeatherMap API: current and forecast weather or historical data
• Wunderground: API for weather forecasts
• Forecast.io API: weather API used by The Dark Sky app and Forecast.io

Government, politics, and law¶

• Chronicling America: historic newspapers and select digitized newspaper pages
• United States Census Bureau APIs (census.gov)
• ProPublica Congress API (projects.propublica.org)
• Capitol Words API: Capitol Words: visualizes the most frequently used words in the Congressional Record
• Sunlight Congress API: live JSON API for the people and work of US Congress

Space¶

• NASA’s API Catalog/NASA Open APIs
• Open APIs From Space: International Space Station data

Other¶

• Last.fm: music related APIs
• Poetry DB: API for next generation internet poets
• Quantopian: “Quantopian provides a large set of financial data for free. The free data includes corporate fundamental data and minutely trade price and volume data from 2002 to present day for all major US exchanges.”
• Untappd API: “Untappd is a social networking service that allows its users to check into beers as they drink them, and share these check-ins and their locations with their friends.” Wikipedia
• BreweryDB API: “BreweryDB is your database of breweries, beers, beer events and guilds”

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