I’m the Innovation Scientist of the Center for Astrophysics and formerly the American Astronomical Society. I help other astronomers do research better and faster. You can find out more on my About Me page, and you can find me on Mastodon as @pkgw@mastodon.world or over email at peter@newton.cx.

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Latest post:

Digital Documents have APIs

Following up on last week’s viral sensation Digital Documents are Web Applications, I want to add another idea into the mix. Here’s an additional thing to keep in mind about digital technical documents: yes, they’re incarnated as web applications. But unlike many web applications, they also expose nontrivial APIs — by which I mean that they expose interfaces aimed not just at humans (the user interfaces) but ones aimed at computers as well. In particular, the primary API exposed by a digital technical document is its cross-referencing structure.

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