Aleksandra Badaczewska

Aleksandra Badaczewska

Alex is a Research Scientist IV at the Genome Informatics Facility at Iowa State University. Her academic background is in Chemistry and Biotechnology, with a Ph.D. in Computational Biology and broad experience in programming and designing web applications. She develops a comprehensive collection of highly customizable visualization solutions for Bioinformatics and supports software optimization for the USDA Geospatial analyses.

DataScience Workbook / 07: Data Acquisition and Wrangling / 1. Remote data access / 1.2. Remote data download / 1.2.2. Downloading online data using API

Introduction

An API user typically needs:

  • a basic understanding of programming concepts,
  • knowledge of the API endpoint and request parameters,
  • an API key or access token,
  • an understanding of data formats,
  • and knowledge of rate limits and usage policies.

Some APIs are relatively straightforward and provide simple HTTP endpoints that can be accessed using a web browser or basic command-line tools. In these cases, a user may not need much programming experience beyond basic web skills such as making HTTP requests and parsing data formats like JSON or XML.