Ghent University (Universiteit Gent, UGent) is a public research university in Ghent, Belgium, founded in 1817 and ranked around #169 in the QS World University Rankings. Like almost every institution, it is a federation of buyers rather than an API producer, and its profile is written on that basis: it operates no central developer portal, no gateway and no institution-wide API programme, and most of what looks like a Ghent API on first inspection belongs to a supplier. The real programmable footprint is concentrated in one place - Ghent University Library. The Academic Bibliography at biblio.ugent.be is genuinely the university's own: a documented JSON/JSONP REST search API, fourteen export formats, a live OAI-PMH 2.0 endpoint identifying itself as the Ghent University Institutional Archive, an SRU 1.1 service over CQL with 78 documented indexes, unAPI discovery, RSS feeds and daily full-dataset dumps, all under the Open Database License. The library also authors and open-sources the software behind it, and three of those services carry first-party OpenAPI 3.1 contracts. Beyond the library the university runs its own SAML 2.0 identity provider and eight entities in the Belgian Belnet R&E Federation, and hosts the student-built Hydra Resto API on a university domain. Everything else is somebody else's: the library catalogue is now an Ex Libris Alma/Primo VE tenancy, and Dodona, which began at Ghent, has moved to its own domain and its own pricing. There is no DataCite membership. Ghent is a Crossref member in its own name.
Ghent University publishes 7 APIs on the APIs.io network, including Academic Bibliography API, Academic Bibliography OAI-PMH, Academic Bibliography SRU, and 4 more. Tagged areas include University, Higher Education, Education, Research, and Research Data.
The Ghent University catalog on APIs.io includes 1 JSON-LD context.
Ghent University’s developer surface includes documentation, API reference, GitHub presence, authentication, code examples, and 19 more developer resources.
Regulatory Posture applies to this provider. Its tags matched the
Education & Research regime, so
Regulatory Posture carries 15 points of the composite.
If this regime is wrong for your business, say so on your
provider repo — the
applicability map is public and we will correct it.
Create-or-Update Ergonomics applies to this provider. This API accepts writes, so it
carries 10 points of the composite. It is scored from the published contracts
themselves: whether a caller can create-or-update in one call, whether the write accepts a key the caller already
holds, and whether the response says which branch ran. Without that, every write needs a search-and-branch in
front of it, and the first time that check is skipped a duplicate record is created.
Scored against the observed mean rather than raw — a provider at the catalog average is unchanged by this facet,
not penalised by it.
The six quality facets above are damped to 75 points between them,
because the conditional facet above carries the other
25. That is why each facet's contribution is shown against a damped
maximum: raising a quality facet moves the composite by 75% of its nominal
weight, not 100%. The full arithmetic is at apis.io/rating/.
Improve this rating by publishing the missing artifacts — every area above can be raised, and the full rubric is at apis.io/rating/. Every facet and dimension name above is a link: it opens that measurement's own page — what it means, the exact checks that feed it, how the whole catalog distributes on it, and the providers at the top of it. This rating is computed from github.com/api-evangelist/ghent: open an issue to ask a question, or submit a pull request to add artifacts.
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The Academic Bibliography (Biblio) is Ghent University's institutional publication and dataset registry, operated by Ghent University Library on the university's own host. It ex...
OAI-PMH 2.0 harvesting endpoint for the Academic Bibliography. The live Identify response names the repository "Ghent University Institutional Archive", declares repositoryIdent...
SRU 1.1 search/retrieve service over the Academic Bibliography, driven by Contextual Query Language. Seventy-eight indexes are documented with their supported relations and sort...
Open JSON API for Ghent University's student restaurants - locations and opening hours, day menus, weekly ecological sandwiches, salad bowls, extra food and allergen information...
An OpenAPI 3.1 contract authored and open-sourced by Ghent University Library for the people and organizations directory behind the Academic Bibliography. Sixteen operations cov...
An OpenAPI 3.1 contract authored and open-sourced by Ghent University Library for the directory of research projects at Ghent University - add, get, delete and suggest operation...
An OpenAPI 3.1 contract authored and open-sourced by Ghent University Library for the administrative side of the OAI-PMH server that fronts the Academic Bibliography - adding me...
Ghent University's own SAML 2.0 identity provider, operated by the university's ICT directorate. The signed metadata document is publicly readable and carries entityID https://i...
lib.ugent.be redirects to libcatalog.ugent.be, an Ex Libris Primo VE discovery layer running under institution code 32RUG_INST and resolving through libugent.primo.exlibrisgroup...
Dodona is the automated programming-practice platform that originated at Ghent University and is still used in its computer-science teaching; Ghent registered it as a service pr...
Ghent University is a Crossref member in its own name - member id 9286, DOI prefix 10.21825, registered in Ghent, Belgium, with 28,489 DOIs deposited (960 current, 27,529 backfi...
Ghent University is registered in the Research Organization Registry as https://ror.org/00cv9y106, distinct from Ghent University Hospital (https://ror.org/00xmkp704) and HOGENT...
aid: ghent
name: Ghent University
x-type: university
x-category: Public Research University
description: 'Ghent University (Universiteit Gent, UGent) is a public research university in Ghent, Belgium, founded in 1817
and ranked around #169 in the QS World University Rankings. Like almost every institution, it is a federation of buyers
rather than an API producer, and its profile is written on that basis: it operates no central developer portal, no gateway
and no institution-wide API programme, and most of what looks like a Ghent API on first inspection belongs to a supplier.
The real programmable footprint is concentrated in one place - Ghent University Library. The Academic Bibliography at biblio.ugent.be
is genuinely the university''s own: a documented JSON/JSONP REST search API, fourteen export formats, a live OAI-PMH 2.0
endpoint identifying itself as the Ghent University Institutional Archive, an SRU 1.1 service over CQL with 78 documented
indexes, unAPI discovery, RSS feeds and daily full-dataset dumps, all under the Open Database License. The library also
authors and open-sources the software behind it, and three of those services carry first-party OpenAPI 3.1 contracts. Beyond
the library the university runs its own SAML 2.0 identity provider and eight entities in the Belgian Belnet R&E Federation,
and hosts the student-built Hydra Resto API on a university domain. Everything else is somebody else''s: the library catalogue
is now an Ex Libris Alma/Primo VE tenancy, and Dodona, which began at Ghent, has moved to its own domain and its own pricing.
There is no DataCite membership. Ghent is a Crossref member in its own name.'
type: Index
deliveryModel:
model: saas
open_source: true
commercial: false
callable_host: true
label: Institution-operated endpoints, plus open-source software the library publishes
confidence: high
source:
- openapi
- plans
generated: '2026-09-01'
method: probed
accessModel:
pricing: free
onboarding: none
trial: false
try_now: true
public: true
label: Free and open, no registration on the public surfaces
confidence: high
source:
- authentication
generated: '2026-09-01'
method: probed
position: Consuming
access: 3rd-Party
image: https://kinlane-images.s3.amazonaws.com/shared/apis-json/icons/ghent.png
url: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/api-evangelist/ghent/refs/heads/main/apis.yml
tags:
- University
- Higher Education
- Education
- Research
- Research Data
- Library
- Open Data
- Identity Federation
- OAI-PMH
- Belgium
- Flanders
- Europe
created: '2026-06-03'
modified: '2026-09-01'
specificationVersion: '0.23'
x-coverage:
state: covered
reason: covered
detail: 'Ghent operates a real, documented, unauthenticated institutional surface and this profile reaches it. Every endpoint
claimed here was probed on 2026-09-01: the bibliography search API, exports, OAI-PMH, SRU, unAPI, sitemap and feeds all
returned 200; the Hydra Resto API returned 200 on all nine documented paths; the university''s SAML IdP metadata returned
200. Three first-party OpenAPI 3.1 contracts were found in the Ghent University Library GitHub organization and are saved
here. Two claims in the previous profile did not survive probing and have been corrected rather than dropped: the library
catalogue''s OAI-PMH, SRU, IIIF and OpenSearch interfaces at lib.ugent.be now 404, because lib.ugent.be redirects to an
Ex Libris Primo VE deployment (institution code 32RUG_INST) which is recorded as a tenant relationship; and the Hydra
day-menu path takes unpadded date components, where the padded form 404s. No surface was blocked, gated or unreadable.
The single unreachable host was apivsc.ugent.be, a VSC research-computing service provider registered in the Belnet federation
whose DNS does not resolve publicly.'
evidence:
- url: https://biblio.ugent.be/doc/api
status: 200
- url: https://biblio.ugent.be/publication?q=dna&format=json
status: 200
- url: https://biblio.ugent.be/oai?verb=Identify
status: 200
- url: https://biblio.ugent.be/sru?version=1.1&operation=searchRetrieve&query=dna
status: 200
- url: https://biblio.ugent.be/unapi
status: 200
- url: https://biblio.ugent.be/siteindex.xml
status: 200
- url: https://biblio.ugent.be/schema/publication.schema.latest.json
status: 200
- url: https://hydra.ugent.be/api/2.0/resto/meta.json
status: 200
- url: https://hydra.ugent.be/api/2.0/resto/menu/en/2026/9/1.json
status: 200
- url: https://hydra.ugent.be/api/2.0/resto/menu/en/2026/09/01.json
status: 404
- url: https://identity.ugent.be/simplesaml/saml2/idp/metadata.php
status: 200
- url: https://federation.belnet.be/federation-metadata.xml
status: 200
- url: https://lib.ugent.be/oai
status: 404
- url: https://lib.ugent.be/sru
status: 404
- url: https://api.crossref.org/members/9286
status: 200
- url: https://api.datacite.org/clients?query=ugent
status: 200
- url: https://api.ror.org/v2/organizations?query=Ghent+University
status: 200
- url: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ugent-library/people-service/main/api/v1/openapi.yaml
status: 200
- url: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ugent-library/projects-service/main/api/v1/openapi.yaml
status: 200
- url: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ugent-library/oai-service/main/api/v1/openapi.yaml
status: 200
apis:
- aid: ghent:biblio
name: Ghent University Academic Bibliography API
x-operator: institution
description: The Academic Bibliography (Biblio) is Ghent University's institutional publication and dataset registry, operated
by Ghent University Library on the university's own host. It exposes a JSON/JSONP REST search API driven by CQL, per-record
and result-set exports in fourteen bibliographic formats, exports scoped to a person, a group, an organizational unit,
an organizational unit for one year, or a research project, a unAPI 1 discovery service, RSS feeds for any CQL search,
a sitemap index of every record, and daily full-dataset dumps in CSV, newline-delimited JSON and MODS 3.6. Metadata is
published under the Open Database License. No key, no registration, no rate limit is documented.
humanURL: https://biblio.ugent.be/doc/api
baseURL: https://biblio.ugent.be
tags:
- Research
- Publications
- Bibliography
- Open Data
- Library
- Research Data
- CQL
properties:
- type: Documentation
url: https://biblio.ugent.be/doc/api
- type: OpenAPI
url: openapi/ghent-biblio-openapi.yml
- type: JSONSchema
url: json-schema/ghent-biblio-publication-schema.json
- type: Vocabulary
url: vocabulary/ghent-biblio-cql-vocabulary.yml
- type: Examples
url: examples/ghent-examples.yml
- type: License
url: http://opendatacommons.org/licenses/odbl/
- aid: ghent:biblio-oai
name: Ghent University Academic Bibliography OAI-PMH
x-operator: institution
description: OAI-PMH 2.0 harvesting endpoint for the Academic Bibliography. The live Identify response names the repository
"Ghent University Institutional Archive", declares repositoryIdentifier archive.ugent.be, a persistent deletedRecord policy,
YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ssZ granularity and an adminEmail of libservice@ugent.be. This is one of the surfaces universities most
often outsource and Ghent runs it itself - Ghent University Library even publishes the OAI server as open source.
humanURL: https://biblio.ugent.be/doc/api
baseURL: https://biblio.ugent.be/oai
tags:
- OAI-PMH
- Research
- Publications
- Metadata
- Harvesting
- Library
properties:
- type: Documentation
url: https://biblio.ugent.be/doc/api
- type: OpenAPI
url: openapi/ghent-biblio-openapi.yml
- type: Conformance
url: conformance/ghent-education-standards-conformance.yml
- type: Examples
url: examples/ghent-biblio-oai-identify.xml
- aid: ghent:biblio-sru
name: Ghent University Academic Bibliography SRU
x-operator: institution
description: SRU 1.1 search/retrieve service over the Academic Bibliography, driven by Contextual Query Language. Seventy-eight
indexes are documented with their supported relations and sortability, from abstract and affiliation through JCR impact-factor
deciles to VABB approval status. The operator states the caveats plainly - scan and explain are unsupported, result sets
are unsupported, only the default CQL context set is available.
humanURL: https://biblio.ugent.be/doc/api
baseURL: https://biblio.ugent.be/sru
tags:
- SRU
- CQL
- Research
- Publications
- Search
- Library
properties:
- type: Documentation
url: https://biblio.ugent.be/doc/api
- type: OpenAPI
url: openapi/ghent-biblio-openapi.yml
- type: Vocabulary
url: vocabulary/ghent-biblio-cql-vocabulary.yml
- aid: ghent:hydra-resto
name: Hydra Resto API
x-operator: institution
description: Open JSON API for Ghent University's student restaurants - locations and opening hours, day menus, weekly ecological
sandwiches, salad bowls, extra food and allergen information - served from hydra.ugent.be, a university host. It is built
and maintained by Zeus WPI, the university's computer-science student working group, and powers the Hydra student app;
the menu data itself is scraped from ugent.be and remains the university's. Version 1.0 is retired, 2.x is current, and
the operator documents a real forward-compatibility contract - clients must tolerate new values of kind and type. Day-menu
dates use unpadded components (/menu/en/2026/9/1.json); the zero-padded form returns 404.
humanURL: https://github.com/ZeusWPI/hydra/blob/master/api-resto-02.md
baseURL: https://hydra.ugent.be/api/2.0/resto
tags:
- Campus Life
- Students
- Menus
- Open Data
- Community
- Mobile
tags_raw:
- Mobile
- Student
- Menu
- Open Data
- Community
properties:
- type: Documentation
url: https://github.com/ZeusWPI/hydra/blob/master/api-resto-02.md
- type: OpenAPI
url: openapi/ghent-hydra-resto-openapi.yml
- type: JSONSchema
url: json-schema/ghent-hydra-resto-schema.json
- type: APIReference
url: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ZeusWPI/hydra/master/api-resto-02.md
- type: SourceCode
url: https://github.com/ZeusWPI/hydra
- type: Examples
url: examples/ghent-hydra-resto-meta.json
- type: Lifecycle
url: lifecycle/ghent-lifecycle.yml
- aid: ghent:people-service
name: Ghent University Library People Service
x-operator: institution
description: An OpenAPI 3.1 contract authored and open-sourced by Ghent University Library for the people and organizations
directory behind the Academic Bibliography. Sixteen operations covering person and organization records, identifier lookup,
suggest, role and settings management, and an explicit set-person-orcid operation that makes ORCID a first-class field.
servers[] is relative (/api/v1) because the service runs inside the university's own estate - no public base URL is published
and none has been invented here. Authentication is an X-Api-Key header.
humanURL: https://github.com/ugent-library/people-service
tags:
- Identity
- People
- Organizations
- ORCID
- Research
- Library
properties:
- type: OpenAPI
url: openapi/ghent-people-service-openapi.yaml
- type: APIReference
url: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ugent-library/people-service/main/api/v1/openapi.yaml
- type: SourceCode
url: https://github.com/ugent-library/people-service
- type: Authentication
url: authentication/ghent-authentication.yml
- type: Errors
url: errors/ghent-errors.yml
- aid: ghent:projects-service
name: Ghent University Library Projects Service
x-operator: institution
description: An OpenAPI 3.1 contract authored and open-sourced by Ghent University Library for the directory of research
projects at Ghent University - add, get, delete and suggest operations over project records. Deployed inside the university
estate behind an API key; servers[] is relative and no public host is published.
humanURL: https://github.com/ugent-library/projects-service
tags:
- Research
- Projects
- Library
- Research Data
properties:
- type: OpenAPI
url: openapi/ghent-projects-service-openapi.yaml
- type: APIReference
url: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ugent-library/projects-service/main/api/v1/openapi.yaml
- type: SourceCode
url: https://github.com/ugent-library/projects-service
- type: Errors
url: errors/ghent-errors.yml
- aid: ghent:oai-service
name: Ghent University Library OAI Service
x-operator: institution
description: An OpenAPI 3.1 contract authored and open-sourced by Ghent University Library for the administrative side of
the OAI-PMH server that fronts the Academic Bibliography - adding metadata formats, sets, items and records, and deleting
records. This is the write half of the harvesting surface at biblio.ugent.be/oai. servers[] is relative; the deployment
is internal and the contract declares no securityScheme.
humanURL: https://github.com/ugent-library/oai-service
tags:
- OAI-PMH
- Metadata
- Harvesting
- Library
properties:
- type: OpenAPI
url: openapi/ghent-oai-service-openapi.yaml
- type: APIReference
url: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ugent-library/oai-service/main/api/v1/openapi.yaml
- type: SourceCode
url: https://github.com/ugent-library/oai-service
- type: Conformance
url: conformance/ghent-education-standards-conformance.yml
- aid: ghent:saml-idp
name: Ghent University SAML 2.0 Identity Provider
x-operator: federation
description: Ghent University's own SAML 2.0 identity provider, operated by the university's ICT directorate. The signed
metadata document is publicly readable and carries entityID https://identity.ugent.be/simplesaml/saml2/idp/metadata.php
on a certificate issued to O=Universiteit Gent, OU=Directie ICT, CN=identity.ugent.be, with the Shibboleth metadata extension
namespace declared. Ghent is a member of the Belnet R&E Federation, the Belgian national identity federation, where eight
ugent.be entities appear - this IdP plus seven service providers including apivsc.ugent.be (Flemish Supercomputer Centre),
sso.irc.ugent.be, naos.ugent.be and login.psb.ugent.be. A federation is shared by definition; the IdP behind it is the
institution's.
humanURL: https://federation.belnet.be/
baseURL: https://identity.ugent.be/simplesaml/saml2/idp/metadata.php
tags:
- Identity Federation
- SAML
- Shibboleth
- Single Sign On
- Belnet
properties:
- type: IdentityFederation
url: https://identity.ugent.be/simplesaml/saml2/idp/metadata.php
- type: Documentation
url: https://federation.belnet.be/
- type: Conformance
url: conformance/ghent-education-standards-conformance.yml
- type: Examples
url: examples/ghent-saml-idp-metadata.xml
- aid: ghent:library-catalog
name: Ghent University Library catalogue (Ex Libris Alma/Primo VE tenancy)
x-operator: tenant
description: 'lib.ugent.be redirects to libcatalog.ugent.be, an Ex Libris Primo VE discovery layer running under institution
code 32RUG_INST and resolving through libugent.primo.exlibrisgroup.com. The catalogue is Ghent''s - the collections, the
holdings, the institution code - but the contract is Ex Libris''s and is not saved here. This entry also records a correction:
the OAI-PMH, SRU, IIIF and OpenSearch interfaces the previous profile credited to lib.ugent.be were re-probed on 2026-09-01
and return 404. They belonged to the library''s earlier self-built catalogue and did not survive the move to Primo VE.
Ghent University Library continues to publish its own Ex Libris Alma client and SDK as open source.'
humanURL: https://lib.ugent.be/catalog
tags:
- Library
- Catalog
- Discovery
- Ex Libris
- Primo
- Alma
- Tenant
properties:
- type: LibraryCatalog
url: https://lib.ugent.be/catalog
- type: SourceCode
url: https://github.com/ugent-library/alma-go
- aid: ghent:dodona
name: Dodona
x-operator: tenant
description: Dodona is the automated programming-practice platform that originated at Ghent University and is still used
in its computer-science teaching; Ghent registered it as a service provider in the Belnet R&E Federation under https://dodona.ugent.be/users/saml/metadata.
It is recorded as a tenant relationship, not a Ghent surface, because dodona.ugent.be now 301-redirects to dodona.be,
which is operated on its own domain with its own pricing behind Cloudflare. Its JSON API (any path with a .json suffix)
and its LTI content-selection endpoint are Dodona's, and no Dodona contract is saved under Ghent.
humanURL: https://dodona.be/
tags:
- Education Technology
- Learning Platform
- LTI
- Tenant
- Spin-out
properties:
- type: AITooling
url: https://dodona.be/
- type: Documentation
url: https://docs.dodona.be/en/
- type: SourceCode
url: https://github.com/dodona-edu
- aid: ghent:crossref
name: Crossref membership
x-operator: registry
description: Ghent University is a Crossref member in its own name - member id 9286, DOI prefix 10.21825, registered in
Ghent, Belgium, with 28,489 DOIs deposited (960 current, 27,529 backfile) as of 2026-09-01. This is a fact about the institution,
recorded as a membership. Crossref's own API contract is not saved here.
humanURL: https://www.crossref.org/
baseURL: https://api.crossref.org/members/9286
tags:
- Crossref
- DOI
- Registry
- Membership
- Research
properties:
- type: Registry
url: https://api.crossref.org/members/9286
- type: Conformance
url: conformance/ghent-education-standards-conformance.yml
- aid: ghent:ror
name: ROR registration
x-operator: registry
description: Ghent University is registered in the Research Organization Registry as https://ror.org/00cv9y106, distinct
from Ghent University Hospital (https://ror.org/00xmkp704) and HOGENT (https://ror.org/00rs45z86), both of which are separate
organizations frequently conflated with it. Recorded as a registration, not as an API of Ghent's.
humanURL: https://ror.org/00cv9y106
baseURL: https://api.ror.org/v2/organizations/00cv9y106
tags:
- ROR
- Registry
- Identifiers
- Research
properties:
- type: Registry
url: https://ror.org/00cv9y106
common:
- type: Website
url: https://www.ugent.be/en
- type: Documentation
url: https://biblio.ugent.be/doc/api
- type: APIReference
url: https://biblio.ugent.be/doc/api
- type: ResearchRepository
url: https://biblio.ugent.be
- type: LibraryCatalog
url: https://lib.ugent.be/catalog
- type: IdentityFederation
url: https://identity.ugent.be/simplesaml/saml2/idp/metadata.php
- type: OpenData
url: https://biblio.ugent.be/doc/api
- type: GitHub
url: https://github.com/ugent
- type: GitHubOrganization
url: https://github.com/ugent-library
- type: SourceCode
url: https://github.com/ugent-library
- type: TermsOfService
url: https://www.ugent.be/en/disclaimer
- type: PrivacyPolicy
url: https://www.ugent.be/en/ghentuniv/privacy
- type: LinkedIn
url: https://www.linkedin.com/school/ghent-university/
- type: Conformance
url: conformance/ghent-education-standards-conformance.yml
- type: Authentication
url: authentication/ghent-authentication.yml
- type: Errors
url: errors/ghent-errors.yml
- type: Lifecycle
url: lifecycle/ghent-lifecycle.yml
- type: Vocabulary
url: vocabulary/ghent-biblio-cql-vocabulary.yml
- type: Examples
url: examples/ghent-examples.yml
- type: DomainSecurity
url: security/ghent-domain-security.yml
- type: Plans
url: plans/ghent-plans-pricing.yml
- type: RateLimits
url: rate-limits/ghent-rate-limits.yml
- type: FinOps
url: finops/ghent-finops.yml
- type: Review
url: review.yml
maintainers:
- FN: Kin Lane
email: kin@apievangelist.com
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