I am considering trying to make an API so that I can make some spatial datasets available to colleagues for analysis.
Part of my work has been to analyze and prepare data which can then be used for further analysis by others. The work (while currently at a smaller scale and less sophisticated) is similar to walkscore but does involve some enormous datasets. There are increasing restrictions on how I can share the original data, but my derivative work is shareable. I have been thinking about about how best to share the results of my analysis (outside of passing on large datasets) and thought that an API would be one approach. What sort of things, should I be thinking about when constructing an API? Are there design specifications that I can follow?
My vision sounds a little more grandiose than it currently is, but I think it would be a useful framework to consider early on in this work.