APItuged

APItuged is a framework and tooling ecosystem designed to tag and classify APIs to enhance discovery, governance, and interoperability. It defines a metadata schema that can be attached to API definitions, gateways, and documentation, enabling automated search, policy enforcement, and impact analysis. Core metadata categories include ownership, version, data sensitivity, security level, rate limits, availability, supported protocols, data residency, and consent requirements. The design emphasizes extensibility, allowing organizations to define domain-specific tags while maintaining a common interoperability layer.

The APItuged project comprises a tagging registry, a validation toolchain, and gateway plugins. The registry serves as a centralized or federated store of tags and meanings, with REST and optional GraphQL interfaces. Validation tools inspect API specifications and deployed endpoints to verify that tags are present and conform to the defined schema. Gateway plugins can enforce policies based on tags during request handling, enabling runtime governance and compliance checks.

History and status: APItuged emerged in open-source and industry discussions in the early to mid-2020s as a community-driven effort to address API discovery fragmentation. It is not an official industry standard, and adoption varies by organization. Several registry implementations and tooling have formed around compatible tag vocabularies, with integrations into popular API management platforms and development workflows.

Adoption and critique: Proponents argue that APItuged improves visibility into data sensitivity, security requirements, and policy compliance, while critics warn of potential schema drift, governance overhead, and fragmentation across ecosystems. In practice, it is used to annotate internal and partner APIs and to support cataloging and policy enforcement in API ecosystems. See also: API management, API discovery, metadata schemas.