VanRoekel: APIs will Play a Major Role in Digital Strategy

Application programming interfaces will be a major component of Federal Chief Information Officer Steven VanRoekel's new government digital strategy due out in April, the CIO tweeted Thursday.

The digital reform strategy will combine two strategies the CIO's office has been discussing -- one aimed at cleaning up the federal web presence and the other aimed at changing the way the government uses mobile technology.

APIs are basically tools for streaming automatically updated datasets that a third party can customize to display on its own sites or apps. Google, for instance, offers an API of its Google Maps data so application developers can embed it and lay other data, such as the location of local restaurants in an online travel guide.

Fierce Government IT Editor Molly Walker speculated APIs would play a major part in the forthcoming digital strategy in a Thursday column. Using APIs would allow agencies to present data in a clean and compelling way on their own websites while also offering easy-to-manipulate raw data to outside developers and researchers, she said.

A few hours after the column posted, VanRoekel tweeted at Walker: "'API' #thereIsaidit #yesitisthesecretsauce #gov20."

VanRoekel's old employer the Federal Communications Commission relied heavily on APIs when it redesigned its Web presence, a process VanRoekel managed.

VanRoekel has been an infrequent tweeter since he became Federal CIO in August, sometimes going a month or longer without a single tweet. He has been tweeting more frequently the last few weeks, though, especially since his April 3 keynote at the FOSE 2012 conference on digital technology.