What can APIs do for you?
Past Global Change Magazine · 2022
As the spatial and temporal resolution of scientific datasets and the culture of data sharing grow, more data on past global changes are now available than ever before.Efficiently discovering, downloading, and integrating data into analyses is critical for making full use of this surge of information.researchers have long used Graphical User Interfaces 1 , or GUIs, to manually search and download data, but Application programming Interfaces, or ApIs, can handle these tasks in a more automated fashion.In fact, ApIs are the behind-the-scenes conduit for many different types of information we use every day, from weather forecasts within smartphone apps to flight schedules aggregated on travel websites.