Members of the Linux Foundation have met in San Francisco to push its newly announced Open API initiative. The collective want to harmonise efforts in the development of connected building technology.

Founding members of the Open API Initiative, including Google, IBM, Intuit, Microsoft and PayPal, want to extend the range of Swagger, the popular framework for building application programming interfaces (APIs). Their collective ambition is to create a vendor neutral, portable and open specification for providing metadata for APIs based on the representational state architecture (REST).

A new open specification could let humans and computers discover and understand the potential of their proposed connected building services with minimal implementation logic. The Initiative will also promote the use of an open API standard.

Swagger, created in 2010 and offered as an open source license a year later, is a description format used by developers in a broad range of industries. It’s used to design and deliver APIs that support a variety of connected applications and services. Downloads of Swagger and Swagger tooling have tripled in the last year as it became the most popular open source framework for defining and creating RESTful APIs.

SmartBear recently acquired the Swagger API open source project from Reverb Technologies and today is working with its industry peers to ensure the specification and format can continue to evolve. The open governance model for the Open API Initiative includes a Technical Developer Committee (TDC) that will manage the specification and keep users abreast of developments.

“Swagger is considered one of the most popular frameworks for building APIs. When an open source project reaches this level of maturity, it just can’t be managed by one entity,” said Jim Zemlin, executive director at The Linux Foundation. “The Open API Initiative will extend this technology to advance connected application development through open standards.”