List of APIs

Data

Author

François Geerolf

About APIs

An Application Programming Interface (API) is an interface or communication protocol between different parts of a computer program intended to simplify the implementation and maintenance of software. Nowadays, many institutionally provided database are available through APIs.

Below, I introduce you to some of these APIs, but there are actually many more you can use.

SDMX

What is SDMX ?

SDMX is the Statistical Data and Metadata eXchange initiative, which is sponsored by BIS, ECB, Eurostat, IMF, OECD, UNSD and the World Bank. Data disseminated in this way is supposed to be structured in similar ways.

SDMX in R

We shall use the rsdmx package to read in SDMX data into R statistics:

  • See the rsdmx quickstart guide. html

Other resources

  • Eurostat explains SDMX. html

  • The official site for the SDMX community. html

  • SDMX REST API: Developers’ documentation. html / Cheatsheet

List of SDMX Providers

You can easily get a list of providers through getSDMXServiceProviders:

rsdmx::getSDMXServiceProviders() %>%
  as_tibble %>%
  {if (is_html_output()) datatable(., filter = 'top', rownames = F, escape = F) else .}

Examples from providers

OECD

ig_d("oecd", "api", "IRLTLT01-FRA-JPN-DEU-GBR-GRC-USA")

Eurostat

ig_d("eurostat", "api", "example1")