I'm not really a rah-rah API guy from the perspective of governance, but they genuinely solve business problems, often in areas not directly anticipated by the

I'm not really a rah-rah API guy from the perspective of governance, but they genuinely solve business problems, often in areas not directly anticipated by the API. For example, suppose you're making a local website for Ogaki restaurants. Getting the addresses and phone numbers of all of them (a couple thousand) would be sort of difficult. Happily, their owners will be thrown in jail if they don't leave that information with the Ogaki food inspector, so if they have an API for food inspection results you can query it, toss the irrelevant data ("In compliance: No rat tails in soup", etc), and get your site bootstrapped in an afternoon.