This page is a living glossary of technical writing acronyms that are good to know when reading technical information. They are organized by topic and will be updated periodically.
API Acronyms
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| OpenAPI | A formal standard for describing HTTP APIs |
| OAS | OpenAPI Specification |
| YAML | Yet Another Markup Language: human-readable data serialization language |
| JSON | JavaScript Object Notation: standard text-based format for representing structured data |
| Schema | A formal description of syntax and structure |
| Object | “Object” named in section headings |
| HTTP status codes | Available http status codes such as 200 and 400 |
| OAD entry document | The document containing the OpenAPI object where parsing begins |
| URI | Universal Resource Indicator |
| ANSI-SPARC | American National Standards Institute, Standards Planning and Requirements Committee: Abstract design standard for database management systems, first proposed in 1975. |
| DBMS | Database management system |
| RPCs | Remote procedure calls: When a computer causes a procedure to be executed in a different address space |
| REST | Representational state transfer: defines a set of constraints for how the architecture of a distributed system should behave. |
| EDSAC | Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator |
| Microservices API | An architecture where the application is developed as a collection of services |
| Composite API | An architecture that can streamline or bundle multiple calls for efficiency |
| Unified API | Bundles related calls to multiple APIs and are common among partner APIs |
| Partner API | Share data between two organizations for a specific business purpose |
| HTTP | Hypertext Transfer Protocol |
| GraphQL | An API query language and server-side runtime |
| SOAP | Simple Access Object Protocol: Messaging protocol for exchanging structured information |
| XML | Extensible Markup Language: Defines a set of rules for encoding documents |