Dear Animal Welfare Community:
Please note: the following blog post is technical in nature. If your organization has a webmaster or IT person you’ll want to make sure they see this post!
We’re happy to announce the availability of a new, robust adoptable pet search Application Programming Interface (API) to help the animal welfare community. This new API uses the SOAP protocol and will complement our existing REST API that is currently used by some of the largest adoption listing websites on the Internet. Visit the SOAP API web page for more information about this new API service.
Because of our strategy (see our Strategy page for more information), RescueGroups.org is in a unique position to provide a revolutionary service to the animal welfare community through our API. Our API will be the first of its kind -- innovative, community supported, open standards, and completely free and without restrictions. And, it will be the first to provide read/write access to a complete suite of data management services.
The API will not include any logos or advertisements, and you will not be required to provide “powered by” credit to RescueGroups.org. We are not commoditizing animal welfare data, and we are truly doing this only for the benefit of the community.
RescueGroups.org is unique because we gladly accept animal updates from a variety of sources and then make that data available through our public APIs. Animal information can be updated through any of our services, via upload from several shelter software applications, or even uploaded directly from the organizations. This flexibility means more and more welfare organizations are looking to us for management services while enjoying the time savings of keeping dozens of adoption listings up-to-date like their own website, Petfinder (via the Sync App), Adopt-a-Pet.com, DogTime, and Facebook (see our Adoption Listing Websites page for a full list of the websites more information).
If you’re considering integrating an animal data API into your website or service, be sure to consider the following:
- RescueGroups.org is committed to innovation on a daily basis
- We have a strong reputation in the community for our timely support and immediate results
- Our support and development staff is in-house
- Our data is trusted by many of the largest web services
- We are a non-profit organization and community focused
We are already building new services based on the SOAP API. We will be expanding this new API in the near future to include read/write access to all of our data structures.
We are excited to lead the animal welfare community into a new generation of teamwork, sharing and openness. Building solutions to help save the lives of pets is important work – and we plan to provide the support and tools you need in order to succeed.