Every industry loves acronyms, and then sometimes they end up overlapping - creating confusion if you don't understand the difference.
Inside of WellDatabase, we do have two acronyms with completely different meanings. Since we can not avoid having two different meanings for API, we want to provide some clarity on which each are referring to.
API - American Petroleum Institute
Our most commonly referred to API in our system is the American Petroleum Institute number. This is a unique number assigned to every oil and gas well. It is used by agencies to identify and track oil and gas wells.
Here is an article on searching WellDatabase for a well using an API:
API - Application Programming Interface
The Application Programming Interface allows you to connect data in WellDatabase to your internal application, without performing a manual export each time you want data updated.
Here are a couple articles that walk through how to set up an API data feed: