# Data & APIs

Most software systems today are powered by Data and APIs. Think of data as a huge deposit of information and an API as the channel to read/write to this deposit. It is important to understand the concepts of how Data and APIs fit together in an software application.

An API offers a set of clearly defined methods of communication to connect to a software system. The most common API used in the web today is the RESTful API.

At Steer we use a variety of different datasets and undertake a lot of cleaning and processing, some of the data is free, others inccurs licensed costs. Most regional authorities provide a data portal to access various datasets.

We also work with a lot of API providers such as Google Maps, Mapbox, Traveline etc.