Developer's Corner

Earlier this summer, the U.S. Chief Information Officer, Steven VanRoekel released the federal government’s new digital strategy which aims to shift the way government information is accessed and consumed.  Instead of focusing on producing a final product, which has been common practice for years, the government will now be making content more accurate, available and secure.  One major tool in the information technology tool box being used to achieve this goal is the use of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). 
An API is a set of tools for building software applications.  But more importantly, an API makes information more accessible.  This is important for two reasons.
First, the use of APIs make it easier to replicate government information across more places than ever before.  APIs enable automatic updates of information when content is syndicated on other websites, while reducing actual person hours currently spent manually updating content.  Read more »

We’d like to thank you for participating in the Health Data Platform Challenges webinar held this past Thursday, July 19. We appreciate your interest in our developer challenges, and hope you'll register and submit innovative works. The webinar recording and presentation are embedded below.

We'd also like to clarify our answer to a question at ~28 minutes in the webinar recording regarding international participation in our HealthData.gov challenges, which may have incorrectly given the impression that non-US citizens and entities cannot participate.

To be clear, the correct answer is that non-US citizens and entities are welcome to participate. Read more »

The first of three rounds of HealthData.gov’s developer challenges are currently open for submission! Health Data.gov is hosting three rounds of challenges that focus on one of two areas, domain or platform. The first round features two challenges that are putting developers to the test; the first to focus on data integration and liquidity is the Metadata Domain Challenge. 
The Metadata Domain Challenge requests the application of existing voluntary consensus data standards for metadata common to all types of government data, and invites new designs for health domain specific metadata to classify datasets in our growing catalog, creating entities, attributes and relations that form the foundations for better discovery, integration and liquidity. Open to submission until October 2, 2012, the winner will demonstrate the application of voluntary consensus and de facto cross domain and domain specific standards to as many of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services datasets available on HealthData.gov.  The two objectives are to: Read more »