Initial design of an application programming interface for a university operating system

The seMeja desktop system is a desktop environment designed for university students. The system needs to provide access to online university services such as course registration, and lecture notes through a variety of applications. In order to facilitate the creation of these applications, a special application programming language (API) for the system is being designed. The design of the API is based on the principles of Create, Read, Update and Delete (CRUD). To the basic four, we add the concept of ‘Notify’ to support registration for push-style notifications and updates. These principles are then combined with an established university ontology that defines the various objects used in a university environment. Therefore, any calls to the API can be thought of as a CRUD operation on a university object. This paper presents the initial design for this university API.