The document discusses the evolution and significance of the Swagger API specification, which began development in 2010 and was later renamed the OpenAPI Specification in 2016. It highlights key milestones, including the formation of the OpenAPI Initiative in 2015 and the release of version 3.0.0 in 2017, aimed at standardizing machine-readable interface files for RESTful web services. The workshop, presented by Chris Bailey at IBM, focuses on server-side Swift and related tooling like Swagger Editor and Swagger Codegen.