OpenAPI Specification
CategoryWeb Services Standards
OpenAPI Specification (OAS) 3.0 is a standard for machine-readable interface files (originally known as Swagger) used for describing, producing, consuming and visualizing RESTful application services. It is overseen by the OpenAPI Initiative (OAI), a project of the Linux Foundation.
API Description Format
RESTful Application Service Interactions
OpenAPI Specification 3.0 defines a standard, programming language agnostic interface description for REST APIs, which allows both humans and computers to discover and understand the capabilities of application services without requiring access to source code or additional documentation, or inspecting network traffic.
When properly defined via an OpenAPI document, a service consumer can understand and interact with the remote service with a minimal amount of the implementation logic. Similar to what interface descriptions have done for object-oriented programming, this specification removes guesswork in calling a RESTful service.
An OpenAPI document itself is a JSON object, which may be represented either in JSON or YAML format. When a single document is divided into multiple, connected parts, $ref fields are used to reference those parts as follows from the JSON Schema format.
OAS uses primitive data types based on those supported by the JSON Schema, and XML types using a Schema Object with the included XML Object metadata.
