ReliefWeb’s Journey from
RSS Feed to API
9/26/201
4

What is ReliefWeb?
Why does it have an API?
How was it built?
What did it take to open it?
What’s next?

Adam
Ross
Software Architect & API Designer
Email:
aross@phase2technology.com
Twitter:
@grayside_sb

What is ReliefWeb
• ReliefWeb is a specialized digital service for the
United Nations Office for the Coordination of
Humanitarian Affairs) established in 1996.
• Global staff of 30 content editors aggregating
and curating content on a daily basis for the
Humanitarian sector.
• Over half a million items, growing by tens of
thousands per year, especially in
the community-sourced areas of jobs and
training.

RSS Was Not Enough
• “Here are the last 10 things: build your UI”
• Deep integrations are RSS-driven migrations, you need
to build an entire application and be responsible for
your own scraped copy.
• This means lots of overhead for innovation

So they Made an API
and...
• Built a mobile version of the site
• Built a trends & analytics site to
examine what’s going on in the
world across decades
• Building a new search system on
top of the API

Built on Open Source
PHP
nginx
ElasticSearch
Swagger
Composer
Klein
Elastica
Jenkins
... etc

Especially
ElasticSearch
• Provides a wealth of search & analysis
functionality for the API.
• Booming community of tools, especially
monitoring.
• Separately scales from main content storage.
• API app focuses on creating a developer
experience.

Opening the API
• Public data, public need, public innovation.
• Already have a webapp, what more could we need?
• (A systematically managed platform.)

API Provider says...
Scale
Analytics
Policing
API Consumer says...
Reliability
Usability
Documentation
Invested

Usability & Reliability
• Hypermedia
• JSON
• CORS (Browser-friendliness)
• Backwards Compatibility a.k.a.
Forwards Compatibility
• Testing (all the ways)
• Getting here is a new version and
over 80% code change

More People Sharing ReliefWeb’s
Mission
• Want people to be able to easily
execute on ideas
• There’s not time to spend days or
weeks learning the system.
• Meaningful usage helps fulfill
ReliefWeb’s goals and drives
technology investment.

Roadmap Teaser
• Infrastructure Upgrade to improve Reliability & Scale
• Usage analytics to target improvements and monitor
community impact.
• SDK & Web Widgets to facilitate integration
• Geo & Semantic use cases

reliefweb.int
api.rwlabs.org

PHASE2TECHNOLOGY.
COM