Application Programming Interfaces (APIs)
This page presents an overview of all APIs that are served by the SoilWise Catalogue for (1) internal processing, (2) reuse of SoilWise data and functionality and (3) to enable future integration with other systems, particularly with EUSO. Information on interfaces is also available in a dedicated subchapter per each Technical Component.
Data Preview & Publication APIs
These APIs allow discovery of (meta)data and knowledge. Most of them are mostly meant to be used as part of SWC backend mechanisms to access or harvest remote data and knowledge resources or to process these resources internally. However, some of them are also relevant for end user discovery of content from SWC. Those user-facing discovery APIs are used in user interface components developed by SoilWise, but could also be employed for integration with the EU Soil Observatory and other existing systems that want to make use of SWC.
| Service | Documentation | Purpose |
|---|---|---|
| Catalogue Service for the Web (CSW) | https://repository.soilwise-he.eu/cat/csw | Catalogue service for the web (CSW) is a standardised pattern to interact with (spatial) catalogues, maintained by OGC. This API is provided by pycsw. update after migration! |
| OGC API - Records | https://repository.soilwise-he.eu/cat/openapi | OGC is currently in the process of adopting a revised edition of its catalogue standards. The new standard is called OGC API - Records. OGC API - Records is closely related to Spatio Temporal Asset Catalogue (STAC), a community standard in the Earth Observation community. This API is provided by pycsw. update after migration! |
| Protocol for metadata harvesting (OAI-PMH) | https://repository.soilwise-he.eu/cat/oaipmh | The open archives initiative has defined a common protocol for metadata harvesting (oai-pmh), which is adopted by many catalogue solutions, such as Zenodo, OpenAire, CKAN. The oai-pmh endpoint of Soilwise can be harvested by these repositories. This API is provided by pycsw. update after migration! |
| Spatio Temporal Asset Catalog (STAC) | https://repository.soilwise-he.eu/cat/stac/openapi | A modern, JSON-based standard for describing and discovering geospatial assets. It is widely used in the Earth Observation community to expose datasets (e.g., satellite imagery, raster data) along with their spatial and temporal metadata. The STAC API enables clients to search, filter, and retrieve collections and items using a RESTful interface. This API is provided by pycsw. update after migration! |
| OpenSearch | https://repository.soilwise-he.eu/cat/opensearch | OpenSearch provides a lightweight, URL-based search interface for querying metadata in the catalogue. It allows clients to perform simple searches using query parameters such as free text (q), spatial filters (bbox), and temporal constraints (time). Responses are typically returned in Atom or JSON formats, making it easy to integrate with web browsers, GIS tools, and other clients. OpenSearch serves as a simpler alternative to more complex catalogue interfaces like CSW. This API is provided by pycsw. update after migration! |
| SPARQL | https://repository.soilwise-he.eu/sparql/ | The API allows query access to the SoilWise knowledge graph, thus offering querying on linked data, traversing relationships between entities that are relevant and cannot be represented in conventional relational databases. This API is provided by Soil-health Knowledge Graph and Virtuoso Triple Store. update after migration! An additional Virtuoso SPARQL endpoint is available at https://sparql.soilwise.wetransform.eu/ (**). |
| Solr Search API | Swagger UI | Full-text and faceted search over harvested metadata records via the Solr index. The Search API serves the Search UI and can be used by external clients. Queries the records_active Solr collection. . |
Processing APIs
SWC processing APIs are mostly interfaces to components that have been developed or adapted to support the processing of metadata (e.g. metadata augmentation, transforming to RDF) or to support quality assurance and visualisation.
| Service | Documentation | Purpose |
|---|---|---|
| Translate API | https://api.soilwise-he.containers.wur.nl/tolk/docs | This API translates content between languages, and is used for metadata translation. It makes use of the EU translation service https://language-tools.ec.europa.eu/. update after migration! |
| Link Liveness Assessment API | https://api.soilwise-he.containers.wur.nl/linky/docs | The linkchecker component is designed to evaluate the status, validity and accuracy of links within metadata records in an OGC API - Records based system. Its responses provide input that is used to inform end users about the status of published links and to collect required data for quality control. An additional endpoint is available at https://api.soilwise.wetransform.eu/linky/ (). Primary instance update after migration! |
| RDF to triplestore API | https://repo.soilwise-he.containers.wur.nl/swagger-ui/index.html | Allows the conversion of RDF, e.g. as provided by the CORDIS APIs, to the SWC triple store. update after migration! |
| Search-API (Solr Indexing) | Swagger UI | The Search API also handles indexing: it processes (augmented) metadata stored in the catalogue database into the Solr index (records_active / records_shadow collections). This is the same service as the Solr Search API above, with indexing as an internal processing function. . |
| Grobid API | — | GROBID is used for extracting structured metadata from scientific PDFs. Deployment details to be confirmed. |
| DOI resolution API | — | DOI references within metadata records are resolved as part of the harvesting pipeline. No dedicated outward-facing DOI resolution API endpoint has been implemented. DOI resolution is handled internally by the Harvester component during metadata ingestion. |
| Soil Mission news feed | — | Mission Soil news items are ingested via an internal harvest task (harvest-newsfeeds) that consumes 28+ RSS/Atom feeds from soil project websites on a weekly schedule. This is an inbound harvesting process, not an outward-facing API. Aggregated news content is served through the Search UI. |
| SoilVoc API | Browser / SPARQL | The SoilVoc vocabulary is accessible as a browsable HTML interface (GitHub Pages) and in machine-readable form via the SPARQL endpoint. The vocabulary terms are maintained in CSV format in GitHub and published as SKOS RDF. No dedicated REST API exists beyond SPARQL. |