Corresponding author: Max Patiiuk (
Academic editor:
External service integration and adherence to industry standards has become ever more important for collections data management platforms. External APIs (Application Programming Interfaces), allow for the development of bi-directional data flows critical to service integration. In contrast to service-oriented backend APIs, public APIs must have continually up-to-date, comprehensive documentation that covers common use cases, on-the-fly request validation, and meaningful error messages. OpenAPI (
Specify 7 is a biological collections data management platform developed by the Specify Collections Consortium (
To support the migration, we developed a custom library to enhance request validation. Parameter validation is extended through a real-time comparison against the existing schema and data. The library is available to the community under a MIT license on GitHub (
In this presentation, we will close with an overview of the next steps for the Specify 7 public API. These include:
An update to the latest OpenAPI specification, version 3.1. The latest version aims to increase compatibility with the Javascript Object Notation (JSON) Schema specification, and thus would allow us to use JSON Schema ( An in-depth evaluation of
Max Patiiuk
TDWG 2021
Specify Collections Consortium
Specify Collections Consortium