Learning more about Thoth’s GraphQL API | Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM)

Snyder, L. O., Arias, J., & Higman, R. (2022). Learning more about Thoth’s GraphQL API. Community-Led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM). https://doi.org/10.21428/785a6451.b8b2f9dd An application programming interface (API) provides users the means for one program to access the information and capabilities of another; put more simply, it is how programs can communicate with each other.undefined Thoth, the open metadata dissemination system developed in COPIM, has an open-source GraphQL API, meaning, any user can construct and manipulate queries—using a pre-defined code language that requests information—to retrieve existing data from Thoth’s database. This is dissimilar from most databases, which restrict what users can query to a particular set of options. Incorporating an open API such as GraphQL prioritizes users, allowing them the agency to retrieve the data they seek, not the server. Ultimately, the benefit of Thoth’s GraphQL is that it empowers its steadily increasing number of users — currently, more than a dozen publishers, among them Open Book Publishers, punctum books, Mattering Press, African Minds, mediastudies.press, and Edinburgh Diamond are already using Thoth for their metadata needs. On August 19, 2022, Thoth met with its users to demo GraphQL in a workshop. Led by Thoth’s software engineer Javier Arias, the team of COPIM’s Work Package 5 guided users through its GraphQL API and demonstrated how to query the API, write queries, and export the resulting data into a spreadsheet.