Early on in the life of Pathomation, it became clear that in order to tackle the variety of use cases out there for digital pathology, we needed offer back-end automation hooks in our various platform components, so that people could optimally use our products and fully integrate them into their own workflows.

PMA.studio is a web-based application. That means that most functionality is accessible via URLs. One of the things we did then is provide these URLs (that already existed) with parameters so that they can be functionality is accessible directly, without the need for a human intermediary to go through a series of steps to activate it.

One example of this is launching PMA.studio, and navigating directly to a specific slide

A great way to facilitate software automation is through the establishment of an Application Programming Interface (or API for short).

An API is a set of protocols and routines for building and interacting with software applications. It allows two software programs to communicate with each other. You can connect to an API, pull data from them, and subsequently parse that data. Using APIs has become the standard way to interact with applications ranging from Wikipedia to Twitter.

PMA.studio itself talks to the PMA.core tile server via its respective API.

Today we, too, see how many of our success stories can be attributed to the APIs our various components offer.