Our series about the Most Interesting APIs in 2018 continues with the Lifestyle and Education categories. Sub-categories covered in this article are Learning Management Systems, Writing, Transcription, Real Estate, Rentals, Food, Beer, Diet, Nutrition, Family, Auto, Travel, Transportation, Cycling, Air Travel, Hotels, Science, Astronomy, Nature, Animals, Politics, Law, and Museums. Developers who create applications for learning, travel, exploring, daily living and enriching the mind may find this list useful.
Can I Eat It? is a social food and drink application for users to connect and share food products and nutritional information. Developers can enable applications to access data about over 80,000 food products with the Can I Eat It? Barcode API. The API supports product search by name, product search by barcode, basic product information, tasting notes, detailed nutritional data, allergen lists, vegan, vegetarian, and fairtrade status.
Can I Eat It? is a community-driven app designed for foodies, diabetics, dieters, and more. Image: Can I Eat It?
Nuzzel scans more than 100,000 news sources and 1,000,000 news stories daily. The Nuzzel News Search API gives developers access to news stories and social signals from top business influencers. Developers can use this API to build a media monitoring system or simply to add news content to their website, blog, learning platform, intranet, or other system.
Global Alliance for Genomics and Health (GA4GH) is a nonprofit organization that aims to accelerate the advancement of genomic medicine through secure sharing of data. The GA4GH Beacon Specification is a web service API for genetic data sharing. It enables querying for information about specific alleles and enables the secure data sharing using Beacon technology developed for the GA4GH.
Zestful provides tools that helps application developers understand their recipes and ingredients data. The Zestful Ingredient Parser API parses food recipe ingredients into structured data. The endpoint parses a list of raw ingredient strings into JSON.
Allow2 is a platform that provides Parental Controls for applications and devices. The API is free for developers, and arms gaming, video, and messaging applications and devices with parental controls such as limites on usage, timers and schedules, rewards for actions, and more.
Allow2 is a parental control API. Screenshot: Allow2
Bikewise is a crowdsourced platform for reporting information about bike incidents such as crashes, accidents, hazards, and thefts. The BikeWise API returns GeoJSON data with bike incidents, including IP address, address, zipcode, city, and longitude and latitude.
Retrieve data about bike theft and other incidents with Bikewise API. Image: Mapbox/OpenStreetMap/Bikewise
UberRiders API allows developers to integrate the ability to request a ride through Uber into third-party applications. Applications integrated with the API allow prospective riders to select the Uber service they need, specify their pickup and dropoff locations, and get time and price estimates for the trip. The API also includes endpoints for Ride Promotions and an Affiliate program.
App developers can provide Uber promos with Deep Links and the Uber Riders API. Image: Uber
Faretrotter allows users to compare transportation fares in cites, airports, waterways, and rail. The RESTfful Faretrotter API returns data on places, flights, trains, buses, and more. API endpoints support flexible geolocation parameter inputs, as well as multimodal and unimodal transportation, specified places, and travel companies.
TravelgateX platform brings together buyers and sellers across the global to a single travel and tourism marketplace driven by AI. TravelgateX provides GraphQL based Travel APIs to access to flights, hotels, excursions, rental cars, and more. The TravelgateX API enables basic procedures like authentication and authorization, booking hotels, mapping, prices, group rates and many other options. The TravelgateX Hotel API connects users to 600 hotel product providers to search for hotels, get room rate quotes, book hotels and more.
Textmunication provides mobile marketing services and an SMS API to target the fitness club industry. The Textmunication SMS API allows developers to create communication services to help drive engagement, retention, and loyalty among users. The RESTful API also enables developers to gain insight on user interaction for marketing purposes.
AirHint platform detects the best flight deals for a given destination, airport, route and time period. The Airhint Airfare Predictions REST API provides airfare predictions, recommendations, and stats. The API will allow applications to predict best time to buy (or wait to buy) tickets, price drop confidence by percentage, price range for a given month.
MakCorpsHotel Price Comparison API allows applications to retrieve JSON data to compare hotel prices, ratings and reviews from more than 200 websites including Agoda.com, Trip.com, Booking.com , Hotels.com, Expedia and more. Enter a GET request by city and get hotels, prices, vendors (websites), number or reviews, and ratings for that particular city.
MAAS2 is a REST API that provides the latest weather data transmitted by the Curiosity rover on Mars. This API is built upon the REMS (Rover Environmental Monitoring Station). MAAS2 responds in JSON formatted data.
>Access data from the Mars Science Laboratory mission's Curiosity rover via this API. Image: NASA/JPL
PlagiarismSearchAPI makes the detection of plagiarism an automated process. It is integrateable into any system and language and is especially suitable for organizations where there is heavy demand of users and the number of texts that need to be checked for plagiarism, such as schools, universities, colleges, and publishing businesses.
FL3XX is an aviation management platform. The FL3XX API returns aviation data about aircraft, airports, flights, and passengers.
FL3XX API can improve the operation flow of an aviation company. Image: FL3XX
Press Association is the UK national news agency that provides multimedia content and services to customers. Press Association Olympics API returns official data associated with various Olympics games including the Olympic Winter Games PyeongChang 2018, Paralympic Winter Games PyeongChang 2018, and Olympic games in Tokyo 2020. The API's current version provides endpoints to search parameters for games, discipline, organization, unit, event, phase, venue, participant, and medal table.
Movebank is an online database of free animal tracking data. This is a global data archive for animal movement data, regardless of species, provided by 5000 researchers and research organizations and managed by the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology, in coordination with the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, the Ohio State University and the University of Konstanz. Developers can use the Movebank API to build applications that connect to the Movebank database.
Movebank provides tools for animal tracking data including live data feeds, maps, and an API. Image: Movebank
OpenShot is a a provider of open source video editing software. The OpenShot Video Cloud API can be integrated into websites, mobile apps, and desktop apps to create, edit, transcode, and animate videos.
Programmatically interact with OpenShot video editing via this API. Screenshot: OpenShot
3play Media provides captioning and transcription solutions for a variety of media platforms. Among their API offerings is the 3PlayMedia Captions Imports API is useful for importing and downloading closed options. It can also be used to implement subtitle translations or manage video content files. And the 3PlayMedia Audio Description API facilitates the integration of audio captioning functionality in apps.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art contains over 5000 years of art from around the world in its collection. The Metropolitan Museum of Art Met Collection API is a newly released Public API that provides select datasets of information on more than 400,000 artworks for unrestricted commercial and noncommercial use. The API provides access to all of the Met's Open Access data and to corresponding high resolution images.
Get programmatic access to 400k+ images + metadata from the The Met collection via API. Image: The Metropolitan Museum of Art
International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List of Threatened species provides evaluation of conservation status of plant and animal species. The IUCN Red List API outputs the same data which is from the IUCN Red List website. The API provides endpoints to a variety of functional parameters including species, countries, species by country, species by region, and species by category, among others.
IUCN Red List API returns data about endangered and threatened species. Image: IUCN
Mera CaarAPI can be used for getting visual details about car components. The data has been obtained from various sources. Developers can use the API to retrieve and manage car component names, unique car components, car component codes, visualizations, videos, sounds and details.
Get detailed views of car components with Mera Caar API. Image: Mera Caar
OpenDroneMap is a platform for post-processing drone, balloon, kite, and streetview data to a variety of geographic data formats including orthophotos, point clouds, and textured mesh. The OpenDroneMap RESTful API provides programmatic access to the OpenDroneMap platform. Create and manage tasks for processing mapping images with this API.
EBU.io (European Broadcasting Union) provides access to a database of audio and video test data and tools via EBUIO QC API. It is provided by the EBU Tech initiative through their Digital Collaboration Hub. As an open source platform under Creative Commons Attribution license, it allows collaboration and standardization on test structure for content broadcast over streaming video, hybrid radio, and other media.
Realty Mole scans thousands of rental listings to calculate an estimated rent for any address. Based on the provided property details the Realty Mole Rent Estimate API will return a rent estimate along with comparable rental properties. This API queries a massive database of recent rental listings and uses a correlation algorithm to find the most comparable rentals. The API returns address, number of bedrooms and bathrooms, geolocation of property, price, square footage, city, state, days listed, and more.
Find comparable rental properties via this API. Image: Realty Mole
The Open Astronomy CatalogsAPI provides machine-readable access to to curated astronomy catalogs, including Supernovae, Tidal Disruptions of Stars, Kilonovae, and Fast Stars. Developers can enable applications to query space catalogues by distance of object, format (example: "Return all supernova metadata in CSV format"), specified attributes ("Redshifts of all supernovae with a redshift reported within 5° of a coordinate"), and more.
Get astronomy data with the Open Astronomy Catalogs API. Image: astrocats.space
LawPanel is an online tradmark platform with access to over 34 intellectual property registries including WIPO, EUIPO and USA. The LawPanel API offers trademark tools for companies. The API provides registry data combined with AI and dynamic programming, allowing developers to automate trademark searching and management.
Click here to see LawPanel public models graph animation created by Aw Young Qingzhuo
Stratfor provides global awareness and guidance to individuals, governments and businesses with tools to analyze world affairs. The Stratfor Enterprise API allows users to interpret global events within the context of an existing application. Developers can retrieve data about global events, country threat indices, and actionable geopolitical forecasts from Stratfor Worldview.
SpaceX designs, manufactures and launches advanced rockets and spacecraft. The Unofficial SpaceX Open Source REST API returns rocket, core, capsule, pad, and launch data, and is maintained by folks in the SpaceX subreddit. This public API does not require authentication and includes endpoints for launches, rockets, capsules, company info, roadster info and more.
The SpaceX Launch Timeline was created with data from the Unofficial SpaceX API. Image: SpaceX Launch Timeline
Open Brewery DB offers publicly accessible information related to breweries, cideries, brewpubs, and bottle shops. The Open Brewery DB API can return lists of breweries with filters by city, name, state, and type.
Caselaw Access Project offers open access to law cases scanned from the Harvard Law Library. The Caselaw Access Project API (CAPAPI) serves all official US court cases published in books from 1658 to 2018. This includes over six million cases scanned from the Harvard Law Library shelves. Developers can use the API to access Caselaw programmatically, to run analysis, or build tools for other users. CAPAPI also includes an in-browser API viewer.
Screenshot: The President and Fellows of Harvard University
Food2Fork is a recipe sharing website. The Food2Fork Recipe API offers JSON responses about recipes based on ingredient search. Get name of recipe, full ingredient list, image of the recipe URL, original URL of published recipe, name of publisher, social rank of the recipe and more with the API. The Food2Fork API is listed under the Food category. See ProgrammableWeb's complete list of Food APIs.
Here's a screenshot of top recipes from Food2Fork retrievable via REST API. Screenshot: Food2Fork