Designing this API

Design

Hello All! Being new to this area, I have google-d a lot about how to design a REST-ful API. And what are the best practices and typical guidelines which should be kept in mind while writing an API. After lots of reading content by a lot of other developers, and spending a lot of time thinking, I came up with the following guidelines which should be kept in mind while writing a REST API.

The goal of your application

Understanding who your users will be, helps a great deal in designing your own application. It simplifies the process of building your API. In this case, I am aiming for researchers and developers who would love to play around with this data and see the connections built around high-profile researchers and some inherent statistics related to them. Since the dataset size is huge, researchers can use it to test their hypothesis and create benchmarks using this dataset. Basically, my goal is to use this dataset to play around with it and enjoy while you are at it!

Think about how you would want a cool and easy-to-use API should be!

I have read a lot of API documentation which companies like amazon, facebook, twitter among others have exposed to developers. I liked some and hated most of them. Twitter has an amazing documentation to get their data out from their data repositories. It really made my life easy during the time I was into scraping and finding new ways to access their data. Amazon Web Services documentation is another shining example of how simple yet powerful APIs and their documentation can be written. The easier it is to use, the fonder developers and researchers would be!