I'm looking into creating a custom front end for our help desk along the lines of this one:

http://www.yale.edu/its/helpdesk/index.html

Using that as a model, my goal is to create Web forms for common request types in order to reduce the amount of time help desk staff have to spend researching requests.Is there an API or protocol (SOAP-based, maybe?) for generating ServiceDesk requests in other applications? 

Absent such an API, is it possible to create requests directly in the database, and, if so, is that documented?