API Collections to Help in the COVID-19 Fight
During the present novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, those on the front lines—including health care professionals, researchers, and government experts—need quick, easy access to real-time critical data. This type of information exchange is what APIs do best, and as an API-first company, Postman is committed to providing whatever assistance we can in this area.
To help continue making it as useful as we possibly can, we’ve made enhancements and reviewed the entire collection to better understand the types of resources being made available.
Here’s how the latest version of the Postman COVID-19 API Resource Center is organized:
- Featured API Collections:
Highlighting the most useful, highest quality, and relevant API collections that have been submitted to the resource center.
- API Visualizations:
Surfacing the individual requests that utilize the Postman visualizer to help make sense of the data being returned.
- Available Resources:
Aggregating all of the resources being made available across all of the APIs, helping reveal what is possible across the APIs.
- Partner Showcase:
Providing an area to showcase our partners who are helping move the COVID-19 resource center forward.
- Additional API Collections:
Listing the rest of the collections that still provide value, but might not always be the most complete or robust.
- Stories from the Toolbox:
Allowing the community, Postman, and our partners to tell the stories behind each of the APIs and collections.
We’ve continued to leverage direct feedback from our community by operating the COVID-19 resource center on GitHub. We’re also calling out for developers to help find or create meaningful datasets and transform them into usable APIs then defined as a Postman Collection. This effort has raised the bar in pushing developers to improve upon their APIs and the collections they are contributing to the resource center with the help of these resource center additions:
- Submission Template:
A Postman Collection Submission Template to help developers build a better collection, providing very detailed guidance on what constitutes a useful collection for any API.
- Rating System:
A system that adds the ability to track the uptime and availability of each API, and apply a rating to each of the APIs, allowing them to be ranked and sorted helping potential consumers find just the right API and data.
- Provenance Linking:
A system of adding links to the data sources of each of the APIs, providing more provenance for each of the APIs, helping validate where the data came from, and showing the overlapping sources of information across all the APIs.
