Collaborative APIs Through Incentive Design (CATID)

Application Programming Interfaces, or APIs, are software interfaces that allow separate applications to communicate with each other. They provide information that is necessary for other applications to access key features or capabilities of that application, while abstracting the specific workings of the software. In simpler terms, they enable services developed and maintained by different organizations to easily interface with one another without the need to know the inner workings of how those services work. API-driven services are the bones of the modern internet. An application such as Google Maps both relies upon API services, and supplies services to other applications through an API. For example, a route-finding app might call Google Maps through an API to find the best public transit route between two locations. In turn, Google Maps might call a traffic monitoring service, a transit timetabling API, and an API providing live bus location information. The advantage of this architecture is that it is loosely coupled, and only relies on the API interface. Because APIs simplify how new application components are integrated into an existing architecture, the result is an ecosystem of highly flexible services that can be configured and reconfigured at will. If this approach were applied to the DoD, it could enable commanders to build ad-hoc services from various data-sources with the confidence that services would behave as promised according to their API. Unfortunately, a key barrier to this approach in the DoD is providing incentives for collaboration between different parties (Services, agencies, commands, etc.). Without proper incentives, each Service, agency, or command builds its own vertically integrated system that cannot be reconfigured, or accessed from another party. Although a collaborative API approach could be mandated Service-wide, this would require extreme top-down design and direction, along with a rigid structure that is the antithesis of a loosely coupled architecture. For commercial applications, money incentivizes collaboration. APIs are public and flexible because this results in financial rewards for the entity that supplies the API. The same reward structure does not naturally exist in the DoD, and hence stove-piped, noncollaborative designs are incentivized; this is in direct opposition to the open, collaborative structure that exists in the commercial world (a structure that the DoD hopes to emulate). This effort seeks to develop novel incentive structures for the DoD that could result in a collaborative API environment. Over a period of 8 months, proposers will investigate and propose suitable incentive structures to enable collaborative API designs in the DoD and provide recommendations on how to implement these incentives in the DoD. A reach goal will be to perform initial validation of these incentive structures in a prototype system or environment.