GraphQL is seeing rapid adoption across a range of industry verticals, especially e-commerce, publishing, online training, social media, digital consultancies and software tooling. But it is also gaining growing interest from businesses and agencies who have a social good agenda, in particular, startups focused on encouraging economic equality, enhancing access to health resources, and providing renewable energy. Cities and government departments are also looking at GraphQL to improve service delivery and provide data services to citizens and businesses.

“I can’t imagine an easier way to get your data,” says Sashko Stubailo, from Apollo. “If you are a non-profit, the more data you move into GraphQL, the easier it will be to consume that data.”

Non-profit organizations and city agencies, for example, often need to combine census data which comes from national sources with state and county level service provider data, and local council data sources that reflect what is happening at the neighborhood level. “One of our dreams is having an easy way to fuse all of that data together. We are really interested in designing with people that will merge together data sources, import schemas at the same time, and create query-related data across a range of APIs.”

GraphQL is already being adopted to drive social good and economic equity projects for startups, artists, in health and renewable energy, and for city and government service delivery.

Economic equity

Joe Wadcan, Head of Business Development at GitHub, says the start of 2017 is perfect for startups who are looking to create new products to build a customer base by leveraging GraphQL as their value proposition. “Now is a good time to enter the market,” says Wadcan. “GraphQL hasn’t fully tipped into the mainstream but as more companies adopt this technology, there will be more opportunities to build customer relationships. We think it is the next wave of how APIs will be built, so it will be pretty advantageous to get in front of this. There will be a need for a lot of new tools, so startups can get in on the next wave.”

Businesses supporting startups are also making use of GraphQL. Startups.co uses GraphQL to power their social networking site which provides advice and guidance for new startups looking to build into viable businesses. And two startups (Stem and Zlyde) are focused on using GraphQL to create services that support artists and content creators to better monitor and claim their royalty earnings from streaming platforms like Spotify and YouTube. New ecommerce outlets are also making it easier for artists to sell their work online. Startups managed by younger entrepreneurs, and artists and performers disenfranchised from the mainstream market are all being assisted to generate revenues and livelihoods by businesses that are using GraphQL as part of their tech stack.

To test the power of GraphQL, Government tech thought leader Mark Headd recently created a GraphQL wrapper for the Section 70 API managed by the U.S. General Services Administration. This API includes contractor data so that small businesses can apply for government work, so testing opportunities to speed up development of new apps that draw on this data is a high priority for supporting small and medium business in the United States.

Health

As 2017 started, the health software development company iHealth advertised for a developer role to help build transformative healthcare products. They explicitly sought out developers with GraphQL skills. Other health startups are also using GraphQL. Australian-based Inerva makes software for the Australian aged care provider industry. They are piloting GraphQL as part of the next iteration of their software design.

One of the first public GraphQL APIs was created by Stanford University’s HIVdb Program which represents, stores and analyzes HIV drug resistance data. The database sees an estimated 5,000 visitors each month and is used by healthcare organizations, scientists and clinicians worldwide to interpret genetically based HIV drug resistance tests to assist in choosing the most appropriate treatments, map the global spread of HIV drug resistance and develop new antiretroviral drugs. The team made a GraphQL API available so that researchers and others can create their own customized data schema models to better access the relevant parts of the rich and complex dataset that Stanford University manages.

Renewable Energy

A public GraphQL API exists that shares data on the location of Tesla recharging stations, and Bright, a startup in Mexico, uses GraphQL to manage data for their services which help residents switch to solar power energy sources as part of their electricity supply. The service is the fastest growing supplier of residential solar power in the country.

Cities and Government Service Delivery

Startup Curio is creating a data management platform that allows users to upload and share datasets and create visualizations and other stories directly from their data. They are currently prototyping examples, in partnership with Platformable, to map the location of UK schools with asbestos risks against socio-economic advantage of neighborhoods and location of cancer prevention and treatment services to see if there is a disparity between health risks and service access. The “curios” are created by combining national, state and local data in the one schema using GraphQL and then an interface (client application) queries the data to create the maps. (Follow me to read an upcoming post on how to map inequality using Curio, and the new initiative from Platformable to support UK schools to advocate for asbestos removal using mapping and tech tools.)

In Finland, HSL, the Helsinki Region Transport public authority, has published a GraphQL API to provide public transport and city bike data so that developers can create applications and maps. The authority also uses the GraphQL API internally to power their own “next generation” journey planner.

In perhaps the most comprehensive use case, the City of Asheville in North Carolina, U.S., is creating a canonical representation of all its data and the relationships between data sets to power the next version of their SimpliCity application, which is used by both internal city staff and public residents to access datasets on properties, neighborhoods, city project initiatives and Council services. For the city, the ability to map their entire data model, including national and state data and public APIs that hold city-relevant information, and to show the relationships between these various datasets, whether they are owned by the city or not, is the key advantage of using GraphQL.