APIOps Cycles is a Lean and service design–inspired methodology for designing, improving, and scaling APIs throughout their entire lifecycle. Developed since 2017 and continuously refined through community contributions and real-world projects across industries, APIOps Cycles provides a structured approach to API strategy using a distinctive metro map visualization where stations and lines represent critical aspects of the API lifecycle.
Open Context Protocol (OCP) is an open standard that automatically transforms APIs into intelligent agent tools through HTTP headers and OpenAPI specifications, enabling seamless tool discovery and context-aware interactions without requiring API modifications.
JSON Structure is a schema language that can describe data types and structures whose definitions map cleanly to programming language types and database constructs as well as to the popular JSON data encoding. The type model reflects the needs of modern applications and allows for rich annotations with semantic information that can be evaluated and understood by developers and by large language models (LLMs).
TypeSpec is a language for defining cloud service APIs and shapes. TypeSpec is a highly extensible language with primitives that can describe API shapes common among REST, OpenAPI, gRPC, and other protocols.
Agent Skills are folders of instructions, scripts, and resources that agents can discover and use to do things more accurately and efficiently.
AGENTS.md complements this by containing the extra, sometimes detailed context coding agents need, with build steps, tests, and conventions that might clutter a README or aren’t relevant to human contributors.
Airbyte is an open-source data integration platform that enables organizations to move data from over 600 sources into data warehouses, data lakes, and other destinations AirbyteCelerdata.
FinOps Open Cost & Usage Specification is an open specification that normalizes billing datasets across cloud, SaaS, data center, and other technology vendors to reduce complexity for FinOps Practitioners.
An open source, extensible AI agent that goes beyond code suggestions - install, execute, edit, and test with any LLM.
APIExamples format is Microcks’ own specification format for defining examples intended to be used by Microcks mocks.
This specification updates the HTTP SEARCH method originally defined in [RFC5323].
Bruno collections are organized sets of API requests and environments within the Bruno API client, allowing developers to structure, test, and share their API workflows efficiently.
A Bruno environment is a set of key–value variables that let you switch configurations—such as URLs, tokens, or credentials—so you can run the same API requests across different contexts like development, staging, or production.
A vCard is a digital file format used to store and exchange contact information, such as names, phone numbers, email addresses, and addresses, in a standardized, portable way.
The Open Digital Rights Language (ODRL) is a proposed language for the Digital Rights Management (DRM) community for the standardisation of expressing rights information over content.
Wardley Mapping offers a wide range of benefits for organizations seeking to make better strategic, operational, and investment decisions.
This specification defines a mechanism through which an OAuth client can identify itself to authorization servers, without prior dynamic client registration or other existing registration. This is through the usage of a URL as a client_id in an OAuth flow, where the URL refers to a document containing the necessary client metadata, enabling the authorization server to fetch the metadata about the client as needed.
KCL is an open-source configuration and policy language hosted by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) as a Sandbox Project.
The Agent2Agent (A2A) Protocol is an open standard for communication and interoperability among independent—often opaque—AI agent systems. Because agents may be built with different frameworks, languages, and vendors, A2A provides a common language and interaction model.
Agents.json is an open-source JSON specification that formally describes contracts for API and AI agent interactions, built on top of the OpenAPI standard.
API Commons is a collection of open-source building blocks for API operations. It began as a machine-readable way to define the parts of an API, and works in concert with APIs.json to translate human-readable aspects of your API program into machine-readable artifacts that can standardize and automate your ecosystem.
APIs.json is a machine-readable specification that API providers use to describe their API operations—much like sitemap.xml describes a website. It offers an index of internal, partner, and public APIs that includes not only machine-readable artifacts (OpenAPI, JSON Schema, etc.) but also traditionally human-readable assets such as documentation, pricing, and terms of service.
The Arazzo Specification is a community-driven, open standard within the OpenAPI Initiative (a Linux Foundation Collaborative Project). It defines a programming-language-agnostic way to express sequences of calls and the dependencies between them to achieve a specific outcome.
AsyncAPI is an open-source, protocol-agnostic specification for describing event-driven APIs and message-driven applications. It serves as the OpenAPI of the asynchronous, event-driven world—overlapping with, and often going beyond, what OpenAPI covers.
Cedar is a simple yet expressive policy language purpose-built for authorization, supporting common models such as role-based (RBAC) and attribute-based (ABAC) access control. It is fast, scalable, and designed for automated reasoning, enabling analysis tools that optimize policies and formally verify that your security model behaves as intended.
The Agent2Agent (A2A) Protocol is an open standard for communication and interoperability among independent—often opaque—AI agent systems. Because agents may be built with different frameworks, languages, and vendors, A2A provides a common language and interaction model.
HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) is a stateless application-layer protocol that defines how web clients and servers format and exchange requests and responses over the internet.
HTTP/2 is a binary, multiplexed version of HTTP that uses streams, header compression (HPACK), and optional server push to reduce latency and improve performance over a single TCP connection.
HTTP/3 is the latest HTTP version that runs over QUIC (on UDP), providing multiplexed streams with built-in TLS 1.3 and connection migration to avoid TCP head-of-line blocking and improve performance.
HAL (Hypertext Application Language) is a hypermedia format for representing links in JSON or XML. Introduced in 2012 for JSON, it now supports both JSON and XML via the application/hal+json and application/hal+xml media types. The specification remains an Internet-Draft; the latest edition is version 11 from October 10, 2023.
The Agent2Agent (A2A) Protocol is an open standard for communication and interoperability among independent—often opaque—AI agent systems. Because agents may be built with different frameworks, languages, and vendors, A2A provides a common language and interaction model.
JSON-RPC is a lightweight, transport-agnostic remote procedure call (RPC) protocol that uses JSON to encode requests and responses. A client sends an object with jsonrpc “2.0”, a method name, optional params (positional or named), and an id; the server replies with either a result or an error (including standardized error codes), and it also supports notifications (no id, no response) and request batching.
JSON Schema is a vocabulary for annotating and validating JSON documents. It defines the structure, content, and constraints of data—often authored in either JSON or YAML—and can be leveraged by documentation generators, validators, and other tooling.
JSON-LD (JavaScript Object Notation for Linking Data) is a W3C standard for expressing linked data in JSON. It adds lightweight semantics to ordinary JSON so machines can understand what the data means, not just its shape—by mapping keys to globally unique identifiers (IRIs) via a @context. Common features include @id (identity), @type (class), and optional graph constructs (@graph).
MCP (Model Context Protocol) is an open protocol that standardizes how applications provide context to large language models (LLMs). It offers a consistent way to connect AI models to diverse data sources and tools, enabling agents and complex workflows that link models to the outside world.
NLWeb simplifies building conversational interfaces for websites. It natively supports the Model Context Protocol (MCP), allowing the same natural-language APIs to serve both humans and AI agents.
OAuth 2.0 allows users to grant applications secure, limited access to their data without sharing their passwords.
A modern, developer-first specification pioneered by Bruno for defining and sharing API collections. Designed for simplicity and collaboration.
OPA (Open Policy Agent) is a general-purpose policy engine that unifies policy enforcement across your stack—improving developer velocity, security, and auditability. It provides a high-level, declarative language (Rego) for expressing policies across a wide range of use cases.
The Model Spec outlines the intended behavior for the models that power OpenAI’s products, including the API platform. Our goal is to create models that are useful, safe, and aligned with the needs of users and developers — while advancing our mission to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity.
The OpenAPI Specification (OAS) is a formal standard for describing HTTP APIs. It enables teams to understand how an API works and how multiple APIs interoperate, generate client code, create tests, apply design standards, and more.
The Overlay Specification is an auxiliary standard that complements the OpenAPI Specification. An OpenAPI description defines API operations, data structures, and metadata—the overall shape of an API. An Overlay lists a series of repeatable changes to apply to a given OpenAPI description, enabling transformations as part of your API workflows.
A Postman Collection is a portable JSON artifacts that organizes one or more API requests—plus their params, headers, auth, scripts, and examples—so you can run, share, and automate them in the Postman desktop or web client application. Collections can include folders, collection- and environment-level variables, pre-request and test scripts, examples, mock server definitions, and documentation.
Protocol Buffers (protobuf) are Google’s language-neutral, platform-neutral way to define structured data and serialize it efficiently (small, fast). You write a schema in a .proto file, generate code for your language (Go, Java, Python, JS, etc.), and use the generated classes to read/write binary messages.
RDF is a standard model for data interchange on the Web. RDF has features that facilitate data merging even if the underlying schemas differ, and it specifically supports the evolution of schemas over time without requiring all the data consumers to be changed.
The Robots Exclusion Protocol (REP) is a web standard that lets site owners tell automated crawlers which parts of a site should or shouldn’t be accessed by publishing a plain-text robots.txt file at the site root (e.g., /robots.txt). It uses directives like User-agent, Disallow, and Allow (plus nonstandard ones such as Crawl-delay) to set per-crawler rules; compliance is voluntary rather than legally enforceable.
Schema.org is a collaborative, community-driven vocabulary (launched in 2011 by Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!, and Yandex) that defines shared types and properties to describe things on the web—people, places, products, events, and more—so search engines and other consumers can understand page content.
Modeling a service should be easy, no matter the interface. Smithy is extensible, typesafe, protocol agnostic, and powers services at AWS.
Spectral is an open-source API linter for enforcing style guides and best practices across JSON Schema, OpenAPI, and AsyncAPI documents. It helps teams ensure consistency, quality, and adherence to organizational standards in API design and development.
UTCP is a lightweight, secure, and scalable standard that enables AI agents and applications to discover and call tools directly using their native protocols - no wrapper servers required.
XML (eXtensible Markup Language) is a text-based, Unicode-friendly format for representing structured data using nested elements (tags) and attributes, making documents both human- and machine-readable. It’s “extensible” because you define your own vocabulary (element and attribute names), organize data hierarchically, and use namespaces to avoid naming collisions.
YAML (“YAML Ain’t Markup Language”) is a human-friendly data serialization format used for configuration and data exchange, built around indentation to express structure (mappings/objects, sequences/arrays, and scalars). It supports comments (#), multi-document streams (—), anchors/aliases for reuse (&id, *id), and optional type tags.
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