An Aggregate Map and Location API Postman Collection

API definitions like OpenAPI and Postman Collections help us document, map out, and better understand the API world around us. The API integration environment, Postman, has significantly shifted the landscape when it comes to how we develop and integrate with APIs. The desktop API tool allows you to connect with any common web API, then organize and save them as Postman Collections — making any API definition a machine-readable, portable document that you can share with others.

We spend a lot of time searching for, working with, and publishing Postman Collections. So we are always intrigued when we come across interesting uses of the API definition format. Recently, we came across an aggregate mapping and location Postman Collection that spans multiple APIs:

• ArcGIS Online

• Bing Maps

• DataScienceToolkit

• Google Maps

• Here

• MapQuest

• Mapbox

• Mapzen

• OpenCage

• OpenStreetmap - Nominatim

The GitHub project provides a very useful collection of APIs that you can use to quickly perform location and mapping searches across API providers. You can put the API collection to work in Postman, or you can translate into OpenAPI 2.0 using an API Transformer and put the machine-readable specification to use in other AP tooling and services.

We've broken the ten separate mapping and location API providers into separate collections and used as the seed for our profiling for the Streamdata.io API Gallery. Each of the API providers has other resources, but this Postman Collection provides a nice distillation of the value each of them brings to the table. Helping quickly get up to speed on not just a single mapping and location API provider, but ten of them at once.