Look up Hygiene Ratings for UK Restaurants.

API stands for Application Programming Interface. In essence its a way to connect two applications together so they can talk. When you ask a weather App on your phone for the latest weather report, it will likely use an API to connect to a weather database to retrieve that data.

New APIs are being written and added all the time. ProgrammableWeb, a directory for APIs, has around 20,000+ listed. RapidAPI, a marketplace for APIs which developers can browse to find useful APIs for their projects, has a growing list, with at least 10,000. RapidAPI has seen an explosion in growth of APIs. In 2018 there were 400 billion API calls on its platform. By 2020 this had grown by an extra 100 billion calls, to 500 billion. In 2016 there were very few users on its platform. By 2020, just 4yrs later, this had grown to 1 million users.

As APIs allow applications to talk directly to each other, this allows for automation. Applications can use the software intermediary services that APIs provide without relying on human intervention. APIs can offer increased flexibility and allow government databases to be opened up for use by everyone, not just a minority. In a recent poll of leading companies, when asked how many APIs they consume, 39.2% said they were using between 400-1000 APIs. 7.2% said they were using over 1,000 APIs.

Wyre Data has used a variety of sources to collate a database of approximately 570,000 UK restaurants, hotels, bars, pubs, cafes, coffee shops and sandwich shops. The information in this database can be used by any App developer to create an App which finds restaurant locations (lat/lngs), food hygiene ratings issued by the FSA, addresses, postcodes etc. All this data can be retrieved by using Wyre Data API endpoints - see Documentation page.