The new preview version Release Candidate 1 is available for testing now.
Release plan
Unless issues are discovered that require postponing, this version will replace the current server installations in 2 weeks on the 19 June 2015.
How to access
Address: rc-api.nameapi.org
API versions: 4.0, 4.1
To connect, use the domain name rc-api.nameapi.org instead of the usual api.nameapi.org. No changes were introduced to the API. Keep using the existing service api as before (4.0 or 4.1).
How to report issues
See the support page.
What happens if you do nothing
After the update in 2 weeks, your existing integration of NameAPI will continue to query the same API, but on the new server installation. Everything should continue running as before. If you want to be absolutely sure, test the rc-api before the change.
API changes
None. Therefore there is no new API version introduced.
Improved functionality
These are behind-the-scenes changes and don’t affect the API itself.
Massively increased name database size
The service uses the latest version of the name database with
- tens of thousands of newly added names
- especially in Latin and Cyrillic, also Greek
- Slavic (Polish, Bosnian, Russian, Czech, Croatian, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Bulgarian)
- French (Breton, Creole, Occitan, Provencal, Languedoc, Canadian French and Swiss French)
- Baltic (Estonian, Lithuanian, Latvian)
Improved name parsing
A substantial amount of work has been put into improving name parsing: culture-specific pattern detections and adjustments, general likeliness and confidence refinements, performance optimizations.