(4) About Me

• Ph.D. in Communications Systems [http://dret.net/netdret/publications#wil97b] from ETH Zürich [http://www.ethz.ch/]
• Working on Web Architecture after writing the first Web Technology book (1998) [http://dret.net/netdret/publications#wil98]
• UC Berkeley (2006-2011), working on Service Models for Open Government [http://dret.net/netdret/publications#wil09g]
• EMC (2011-2014), working on transforming software products into service platforms
• Siemens (2014-2015), working on using IoT to build WoT (APIs for Things)
• Joined CA [http://www.ca.com/]'s API Academy [http://www.apiacademy.co/] in 2016 and now all about API Strategy and Design
• Active in the usual places such as Twitter [http://twitter.com/dret], GitHub [http://github.com/dret], my blog [http://dret.typepad.com/dretblog/], LinkedIn [www.linkedin.com/in/netdret], and flickr [https://www.flickr.com/photos/dret/]

(5) API Academy [http://www.apiacademy.co/]

• Global Team working on API Strategy and Design topics
  • Matt McLarty [http://www.apiacademy.co/team_member/matt-mclarty/] (Vancouver)
  • Mike Amundsen [http://www.apiacademy.co/team_member/mike-amundsen/] (Cincinnati)
  • Ronnie Mitra [http://www.apiacademy.co/team_member/ronnie-mitra/] (London)
  • Erik Wilde [http://www.apiacademy.co/team_member/erik-wilde/] (Zürich/Berkeley)
• Evangelizing ideas and technologies
  • Speaking (conferences, events)
  • Teaching (workshops, bootcamps)
  • Publishing (blogs, articles, books, podcasts [https://soundcloud.com/user-426834320])
  • Doing (side projects on API-related topics)
  • Standardizing (participating in specification work)

(7) Language Matters

• APIs are languages
• Representations are language sentences
• Design and document the language of each API
• Webby design should use language composition
• Reusing/composing vocabularies helps with interoperability

(8) The Web Vocabulary

(9) Extending the Web Surface

• Adding concept values reflects new things to talk about
• Adding concepts reflects new classes of things to talk about
• A good pattern is to connect languages (and possibly make them extensible)
  • Make a new concept discoverable via an existing one (Link HTTP Header field [http://webconcepts.info/concepts/http-header/Link])
  • Establish a concept by defining/managing its value space (IANA link relation type registry [https://www.iana.org/assignments/link-relations/link-relations.xhtml#link-relations-1])
  • The value space can be used for further extensions of the Web surface

(11) Avoid Snowflakes

(12) Standards vs. Documentation

(13) Standard Anti-Patterns

• The Goldberg [https://www.rubegoldberg.com/] Standard
  • Do one thing rather complicated and in a hard-to-change way
• The Pie in the Sky Standard
  • Instead of doing one thing, build a framework for getting things done
• The Hypervertical Standard
  • Do something so specific that it's unlikely to see much reuse

(14) Understand the Context

• Who am I?
• Understand the complexity
• Understand the complication/confusion

(15) Standards are Languages and not the Truth

(16) Pick Your Battles

• Identify the key aspects that matter for you
• Be ready to compromise on non-essential aspects
• Language utility is mostly a function of the user base

(18) Standard Types [https://www.safaribooksonline.com/library/view/restful-web-apis/9781449359713/pr05.html]

• Fiat standards: Why not do it this way?
• Personal standards: I like the way this has been done.
• Corporate standards: Let's try to figure out a way to do this.
• Open standards: Hello everybody! Let's solve this problem!

(19) Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF)

(20) World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)

(22) Just Get Started

• Expect to get some pushback
• Expect to adjust the scope
• Expect it to go slowly
• Help the community by still doing it

(23) Thanks! Q&A

• Slides online: dret.net/lectures/restfest-2017 [http://dret.net/lectures/restfest-2017]
• Slide sources: dret/lectures [http://github.com/dret/lectures/tree/master/restfest-2017] on GitHub [http://github.com/]
• Me: http://dret.net/netdret/ [http://dret.net/netdret/]
• Twitter: @dret [http://twitter.com/dret]