The National Archives and Records Administration has some interactive documentation on the application programming interface – API, for the Federal Register that provides some insight into how programs interact with each other to push and pull JSON data. In a few steps a visitor to its documentation site (https://www.federalregister.gov/developers/api/v1) can request JSON for all agencies in the federal government, or just one, to get a sense of how a request and response shakes out – and provides an intro into some basic concepts surrounding open data, APIs, and JSON.
“These steps are essentially the same process that you automate when you write a program to interact with APIs,” explained William Brantley, a program analyst in forecasting and methods at OPM. “Your software finds the API, uses a request authorized by the API, and then receives a response from the API,” he said in a post on digitalgov.gov.
