Today the majority of government applications do not have programming interfaces to automatically interact with. The reasons for locked application are diverse. On the other hand: What are incentives for interoperability?
Beside GUIs for human interaction Open Data catalogs like https://opendata.swiss or https://data.stadt-zuerich.ch have got APIs, too. All of a CKAN website’s core functionality (everything you can do with the web interface and more) can be used by external code that calls the CKAN action API.
This presentation is listing examples of CKAN action API requests, and presents some use cases and ideas for its usage, which deliver added value for both data-users and data-publishers.