Dialog Adds Application Programming Interface Feature, But Where are APIs Going?
LocalTechWire covered Dialog's announcement of their new Application Programming Interface (API) kit's availability, joining rivals LexisNexis and Factiva in the race to contextualize premium content more effectively in institutional portals. Being able to bring premium content into portal applications is increasing in importance to these vendors as fewer of their clients opt to have information professionals wrestle with the previously arcane interfaces of these services and instead choose to place the content where it will have the most value to users. In the race to contextualize content, though, these vendors appear to be running towards many of the same issues that financial datafeed vendors have had to face over the past decade as their previously terminal-bound premium products had to make way for content that was being contextualized by client-supplied software consuming their feeds. Their solution to avoid commoditization was to buy back the value-added desktops and distribution architectures of many of their clients' software providers so as to offer a framework for more comprehensive content solutions. But in today's more open Web content distribution environment, in which institutions play a far more active role in developing their own content solutions, few content companies involved in general content aggregation such as Dialog are going to have the clout and capability to even consider creating or capturing appropriate desktop solutions for specific market environments across the multiple market verticals that they face. Smart aggregators continue to position "workflow" front ends for their target sectors, but with the flourishing of APIs for general business content the door has been opened for organizations to examine competitive sources in a much more objective light - and for content aggregators to consider more actively where their long-term formula for content value success will be. In such an environment, providing Web services-enabled solutions that provide both contextuality and personalized service becomes all the more important.