The Egyptian god Apis, a bull deity who served as an intermediary between humans and God. From Flickr by Jan.
We need your help! We are beginning work on developing the DMPTool API (application programming interface) and need use cases. If you aren’t familiar with APIs (, I’ve attached a few slides to help explain the concept. But basically, it’s how you can get information INTO or OUT OF the DMPTool. Readwrite.com has a great description:
In the simplest terms, APIs are sets of requirements that govern how one application can talk to another. APIs aren’t at all new; whenever you use a desktop or laptop, APIs are what make it possible to move information between programs—for instance, by cutting and pasting a snippet of a LibreOffice document into an Excel spreadsheet. System-level APIs makes it possible for applications like LibreOffice to run on top of an OS like Windows in the first place.
So what information do you want from the DMPTool? Or what do you want it to provide to other applications? You can comment on this post, email us, or add your suggestion directly to the GitHub issue tracker with the “API use cases” tag.
Examples:
- You want the number of people who have completed plans for each of the different funders at your institution.
- You want to download all of the templates that admins at your institution have created.
- You want the DMPTool to directly deposit a copy of a plan into your institutional repository.
- ???
DMPTool Blog 
Hi Carly,
A couple of ideas we’ve had from the UK are:
– Pushing info from research information management systems (e.g. PI name, project title, funder…) to create a plan that researchers then just go and fill out
– Pushing info from HR systems to create user accounts so researchers don’t have to go through the registration process
– Pulling basic metadata out of the DMP to populate a dataset record in the repository
– Sending alerts from repositories when data is deposited to update the DMP and add a URL
That’s all I can think of for now. Will let you know if there are any more.
Sarah