# University of Hong Kong

**Canonical:** https://apis.io/providers/hku/  
**Website:** https://www.hku.hk/  
**APIs profiled:** 7

The University of Hong Kong (HKU) is a public research university in Hong Kong SAR, founded in 1911 and ranked in the top 30 of the QS World University Rankings. It operates no public, self-serve API programme. The machine-readable surfaces HKU genuinely runs on its own hosts are identity infrastructure: a Shibboleth SAML 2.0 identity provider at hkafidp.hku.hk, registered with the Hong Kong Access Federation in 2016 and exported to eduGAIN with REFEDS Research and Scholarship and SIRTFI declarations, and an AD FS OAuth 2.0 / OpenID Connect issuer at adfs.hku.hk publishing a live discovery document and JWKS. HKU ITS also runs an Azure API Management gateway (api.hku.hk) and developer portal (developer.hku.hk) that opened GenAI chat-completion, embedding and image-generation APIs to students in March 2026 — but every portal route redirects to institutional sign-in, so no specification, scope or endpoint list is publicly readable. Its research repository is a Figshare tenancy and its library discovery is an Ex Libris Primo tenancy: real institutional facts, vendor-operated contracts, recorded here as tenant relationships rather than credited to HKU. HKU publishes no OpenAPI, no robots.txt on its main host, no llms.txt, no status page and no API changelog.

## Kin Score — 44.0 / 100 (developing)

Scored 2026-08-20 under rubric 0.12.0. Trend: flat (+1.9 from 42.1).

| Facet | Score |
|---|---|
| Discoverability | 74.1 |
| Contract Quality | 23.0 |
| Governance | 63.6 |
| Contract Governance | 63.6 |
| Operational Transparency | 36.8 |
| Developer Ergonomics | 19.0 |
| Commercial Clarity | 39.5 |
| Access Clarity | 39.5 |

Regulatory layer — **Education & Research**: 72.2 (matched via tags).

## Agent readiness — 34.0 (agent-ready)

| Dimension | Value |
|---|---|
| Spec Presence | yes |
| Agentic Access | derived |
| Reversibility Documented | no |
| MCP Server | no |
| Auth Clarity | yes |
| Idempotency | no |
| Error Semantics | documented |
| OpenAPI Examples | documented |
| Rate Limit Signal | documented |
| Event Surface Described | no |
| Agent Skills | no |
| Well Known Catalog | no |
| Consent Identity | no |
| Agent Card | no |
| Dry Run Mode | no |

## Access

Affiliation-gated · No public self-serve access — onboarding: unknown, pricing: free, trial: no (confidence: high).

## APIs (7)

- **HKU Shibboleth Identity Provider** — The University of Hong Kong's own Shibboleth SAML 2.0 identity provider, entityID https://hkafidp.hku.hk/idp/shibboleth, scope hku.hk. It self-publishes signed metadata (HTTP 20...
- **HKU AD FS OAuth 2.0 / OpenID Connect Issuer** — Institution-operated OpenID Connect issuer at https://adfs.hku.hk/adfs, serving a live discovery document, a JWKS with an RS256 signing key, a UserInfo endpoint that returns a c...
- **HKU ITS API Developer Portal and Gateway** — HKU Information Technology Services runs an Azure API Management gateway at api.hku.hk and a developer portal at developer.hku.hk. Since 17 March 2026 the portal has issued subs...
- **HKU Scholars Hub OAI-PMH** — HKU Scholars Hub is the University's DSpace-based open-access institutional repository and current research information system, on HKU's own host. It is documented as exposing a...
- **HKU DataHub (Figshare tenancy)** — HKU DataHub is the University's research-data repository, running as a Figshare tenancy — datahub.hku.hk is a CNAME to figshare.com and the same content is served at hku.figshar...
- **HKU Libraries Discovery (Ex Libris Primo tenancy)** — HKU Libraries' discovery layer runs on Ex Libris Primo VE at julac-hku.primo.exlibrisgroup.com under the JULAC consortium view 852JULAC_HKU. The catalog records are HKU's; the d...
- **HKU Microsoft Entra ID Tenant** — HKU's Microsoft Entra ID tenant (42f9b54e-2477-41ba-bf09-7a0d2a83ff09) publishes a live OpenID Connect discovery document for the hku.hk domain. It is institution-specific and m...

## Agentic access (1)

- **Hku Agentic Access** — 157 operations · 81 acting · 2 human-in-the-loop

## Security (2)

- **Hku Authentication** — oauth2/openIdConnect/saml2/apiKey · 4 schemes
- **Hku Domain Security** — TLSv1.2 · HSTS · DMARC

## Plans (1)

- **Hku Plans Pricing**

## Tags

Education, Higher Education, University, Hong Kong, Identity Federation, Single Sign-On, Research Data, Open Access, Artificial Intelligence, Research Computing

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Profiled by [API Evangelist](https://apievangelist.com) and published on [APIs.io](https://apis.io/providers/hku/). Scores are computed from the provider's own public artifacts under a published rubric.