Data Transparency
Pulse
Octopart Staff
Oct 10, 2017

Over the past few months we've been adding features and data to the new version of the Octopart API. Today I wanted to highlight what I think is one of the most important features of our new API: data transparency.

Currently there are a few commercially available part databases that engineering firms purchase in order to get access to technical specs, datasheets, compliance data and lifecycle status. All of that data is aggregated from many sources including manufacturer feeds, web crawling, and human data entry. However, for the most part, the source of each data point isn't transparent to customers.

To help fix this problem, we decided to include the sources of each point as Attribution objects in the API:

http://octopart.com/api/docs/v3/rest-api#object-schemas-attribution

By accessing the attribution of each point you can see, for example, that our TI specs and lifecycle data come directly from TI and that our Analog Devices datasheets comes from an Analog feed.

We're still working on integrating the data into the Octopart website but if you would like early access you should check out the Octopart API!

Read More Articles