3.8 API Catalog [1]¶

The Guidelines define the Catalog of API TDH022 (in brief, Catalog) as a single and centralized component, which ensures to the parties involved in the delivery and use relationship the knowledge of the available APIs, and for the latter, the declared service levels.

The presence of the Catalog is functional to:

• facilitate the interoperability between administrations and interested private parties;
• contain government spending by reducing API replication;
• ensure the declaration of the SLOs by the Provider on the single published APIs;
• express, where present, the commitments between Providers and Users relating to the use of APIs (SLA).

The Catalog, without prejudice to the common principles that will be issued by the Ministry of Tourism, in order to standardize the technologies used at national level, considers:

• Specificity of the different areas within which the Ministry of Tourism operates through the determination of thematic classes of the contents in the Catalog, thus providing aggregations of APIs based on different taxonomies. This choice is further justified by the opportunity to share common methodologies for the purposes of design and development within a common ecosystem (TDH).
• Need to ensure the governance of the Catalog, as a prerequisite for guaranteeing a univocal and shared semantics, to avoid redundancies and / or overlaps in terms of competences and contents (de-duplication).
• Need to ensure a formal description of the APIs which, using the Interface Description Language (IDL) indicated, allows to describe the APIs regardless of the programming language adopted by the Provider and Users.