Newcastle University is a public research university in Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom, and a member of the Russell Group. Its programmable footprint is genuinely its own but it is small, decentralised and unadvertised: there is no central developer portal, no API changelog, no status page and no developer support channel anywhere on ncl.ac.uk. What the institution actually operates and runs itself, verified live on 2026-08-30, is four things — the Urban Observatory API for the Urban Sciences Building (the largest open urban-sensing platform in the UK, on a domain Newcastle registered and serves from its own nameservers), the Library's Digitised Objects Repository Search and Data API, which publishes its own OpenAPI at /info/open-api and serves 15,482 digitised objects from Special Collections, the ECPPEC eighteenth-century electoral GraphQL API with open introspection, and an OAI-PMH 2.0 endpoint over the eTheses repository. Alongside these it operates a Shibboleth SAML 2.0 identity provider registered in the UK Access Management Federation with 168 service providers under ncl.ac.uk, which is by volume the institution's largest machine-readable surface and is a login federation rather than a data API. Its research data repository, data.ncl, is a Figshare tenant: the data and the DOIs are Newcastle's, the API contract is Figshare's, and it is recorded here as a tenant relationship rather than credited to the university.
Newcastle University publishes 5 APIs on the APIs.io network, including Digitised Objects Repository Search and Data API, Urban Observatory API (Urban Sciences Building) — Entity, Urban Observatory API (Urban Sciences Building) — Feed, and 2 more. Tagged areas include University, Higher Education, Education, United Kingdom, and Russell Group.
The Newcastle University catalog on APIs.io includes 1 JSON-LD context and 2 Spectral governance rulesets.
Newcastle University’s developer surface includes authentication 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 does not apply to this provider. The published contracts declare
no write operations, and a read-only API cannot create-or-update. The facet is excluded from this provider's
denominator entirely — not scored zero. A reference or data API is not deficient for being unable to
upsert.
The six quality facets above are damped to 85 points between them,
because the conditional facet above carries the other
15. That is why each facet's contribution is shown against a damped
maximum: raising a quality facet moves the composite by 85% 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/newcastle: open an issue to ask a question, or submit a pull request to add artifacts.
Submit an artifact on GitHub — free →Manage your own listing — the Influence plan, $499/mo →
A single point-of-truth interface for searching, browsing and displaying the digitised objects held in Newcastle University Library's Special Collections. Eighteen operations ac...
A GraphQL API over the Eighteenth-Century Political Participation and Electoral Culture research dataset — historical British elections, constituencies, candidates, poll books, ...
An OAI-PMH 2.0 metadata harvesting interface over Newcastle University's electronic theses repository, running on DSpace 6.3. Supports oai_dc, dim and the uketd_dc profile used ...
Newcastle University's institutional research data repository, operated for the university by Figshare on a Newcastle-branded custom domain. Programmatic access exists but runs ...
An entity ordinarily describes a spatial location, such as a room in a building or a pole in the street. In some circumstances an entity may be a mobile piece of equipment, in w...
There may be more than one timeseries associated with a feed. Ordinarily there will be a plain timeseries representing raw data from the device; in some cases there may be addit...
aid: newcastle
name: Newcastle University
x-type: university
x-category: Public Research University
description: 'Newcastle University is a public research university in Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom, and a member of
the Russell Group. Its programmable footprint is genuinely its own but it is small, decentralised and unadvertised: there
is no central developer portal, no API changelog, no status page and no developer support channel anywhere on ncl.ac.uk.
What the institution actually operates and runs itself, verified live on 2026-08-30, is four things — the Urban Observatory
API for the Urban Sciences Building (the largest open urban-sensing platform in the UK, on a domain Newcastle registered
and serves from its own nameservers), the Library''s Digitised Objects Repository Search and Data API, which publishes its
own OpenAPI at /info/open-api and serves 15,482 digitised objects from Special Collections, the ECPPEC eighteenth-century
electoral GraphQL API with open introspection, and an OAI-PMH 2.0 endpoint over the eTheses repository. Alongside these
it operates a Shibboleth SAML 2.0 identity provider registered in the UK Access Management Federation with 168 service providers
under ncl.ac.uk, which is by volume the institution''s largest machine-readable surface and is a login federation rather
than a data API. Its research data repository, data.ncl, is a Figshare tenant: the data and the DOIs are Newcastle''s, the
API contract is Figshare''s, and it is recorded here as a tenant relationship rather than credited to the university.'
type: Index
x-coverage:
state: covered
reason: covered
detail: 'Four institution-operated APIs and one identity federation were found, probed and verified live on 2026-08-30,
and one vendor-platform tenancy was identified and labelled rather than credited. The profile is thin in developer-experience
terms — no portal, no changelog, no status page, no support channel, no scopes and no versioning policy — and that thinness
is a real measurement of the institution, not a gap in coverage. Two claims carried by the previous profile did not survive
probing and were corrected: eprints.ncl.ac.uk does not expose OAI-PMH (it is an ASP.NET application and /cgi/oai2, /oai2
and /api all redirect to error_page.aspx), and the ECPPEC API does not live at ecppec.ncl.ac.uk/api/, which is a WordPress
documentation page pointing at the real GraphQL host at api-ecppec.ncl.ac.uk.'
generated: '2026-08-30'
method: probed
evidence:
- url: https://api.usb.urbanobservatory.ac.uk/api/v2.0a/sensors/entity
status: 200
note: 616 entities returned anonymously
- url: https://api.usb.urbanobservatory.ac.uk/openapi.json
status: 200
note: first-party OpenAPI served by the API itself
- url: https://api-dor.ncl.ac.uk/info/open-api
status: 200
note: first-party OpenAPI, 18 paths, harvested into openapi/_original/
- url: https://api-dor.ncl.ac.uk/v1/digitised-objects?page.size=2
status: 200
note: 15,482 digitised objects across 7,741 pages
- url: https://api-ecppec.ncl.ac.uk/
status: 200
note: GraphQL POST with open introspection; 19 root queries; live data returned
- url: https://theses.ncl.ac.uk/oai/request?verb=Identify
status: 200
note: OAI-PMH 2.0, DSpace 6.3, formats oai_dc / dim / uketd_dc
- url: https://gateway.ncl.ac.uk/idp/shibboleth
status: 200
note: SAML 2.0 IdP metadata, scope ncl.ac.uk
- url: https://data.ncl.ac.uk/
status: 202
note: Figshare tenant; CNAME to figshare.com; edge returns an empty 202 bot challenge to non-browser clients
- url: https://eprints.ncl.ac.uk/cgi/oai2?verb=Identify
status: 404
note: redirects to error_page.aspx — the previously claimed OAI-PMH interface does not exist
- url: https://newcastle.urbanobservatory.ac.uk/api/v1.1/sensors/json/
status: 200
note: soft-200 — returns a 661-byte SPA shell, not data; the v1.1 API is gone from this host
- url: https://www.ncl.ac.uk/llms.txt
status: 404
- url: https://www.ncl.ac.uk/.well-known/security.txt
status: 404
deliveryModel:
model: saas
open_source: false
commercial: false
callable_host: true
label: Hosted service · you call their endpoint
confidence: high
source:
- openapi
- probe
generated: '2026-08-30'
method: probed
accessModel:
pricing: free
onboarding: none
trial: false
try_now: true
public: true
label: Free and open — no registration, no key, no scopes
confidence: high
source:
- probe
- plans
generated: '2026-08-30'
method: probed
position: Producing
access: Public
image: https://kinlane-images.s3.amazonaws.com/shared/apis-json/icons/newcastle.png
url: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/api-evangelist/newcastle/refs/heads/main/apis.yml
tags:
- University
- Higher Education
- Education
- United Kingdom
- Russell Group
- Research Data
- Open Data
- Digital Library
- Identity Federation
- Smart Cities
- Cultural Heritage
created: '2026-06-03'
modified: '2026-08-30'
specificationVersion: '0.23'
apis:
- aid: newcastle:digitised-objects
name: Digitised Objects Repository Search and Data API
x-operator: institution
x-operator-evidence: api-dor.ncl.ac.uk resolves to dls-dor01.ncl.ac.uk (128.240.212.10), under the university's own registrable
domain. info.title reads "Newcastle University | Digitised Objects Repository | Search and Data API"; the description
names Special Collections and Archives as data curators and Digital Library Services as administrators. No vendor identity
in servers[], title or contact.
description: A single point-of-truth interface for searching, browsing and displaying the digitised objects held in Newcastle
University Library's Special Collections. Eighteen operations across collections, digitised objects, items, search, autocomplete,
transcripts, IIIF image delivery, TEI content and CONTENTdm identifier resolution. Open, unauthenticated, HATEOAS-linked,
and it publishes its own OpenAPI and build number from a machine-readable /info endpoint. Verified live 2026-08-30 serving
15,482 digitised objects.
humanURL: https://api-dor.ncl.ac.uk/
baseURL: https://api-dor.ncl.ac.uk
tags:
- Digital Library
- Cultural Heritage
- Search
- Repository
properties:
- type: OpenAPI
url: openapi/newcastle-digitised-objects-api-openapi.yml
- type: APIReference
url: https://api-dor.ncl.ac.uk/info/open-api
- type: Documentation
url: https://api-dor.ncl.ac.uk/
- type: JSONSchema
url: json-schema/newcastle-digitised-object-schema.json
- type: JSONSchema
url: json-schema/newcastle-dor-collection-schema.json
- type: JSONSchema
url: json-schema/newcastle-dor-pagination-schema.json
- type: JSONSchema
url: json-schema/newcastle-dor-error-schema.json
- type: x-examples
url: examples/newcastle-digitised-objects-collections-example.json
- type: x-examples
url: examples/newcastle-digitised-objects-list-example.json
- type: x-vocabulary
url: vocabulary/newcastle-institution-vocabulary.yml
- type: Website
url: https://www.ncl.ac.uk/library/special-collections/
- aid: newcastle:ecppec
name: ECPPEC Electoral Data GraphQL API
x-operator: institution
x-operator-evidence: api-ecppec.ncl.ac.uk resolves to a10-vip-ecppec.ncl.ac.uk (128.240.212.230), inside Newcastle University's
own network and under its own registrable domain. The GraphQL server path disclosed in error output is /home/ecppec/graphql-server/ECPPEC/graphql.
No vendor identity appears in the schema, the host or the errors.
description: A GraphQL API over the Eighteenth-Century Political Participation and Electoral Culture research dataset —
historical British elections, constituencies, candidates, poll books, voters, votes, occupations, geocodes and cultural
artefacts. Nineteen root queries, no mutations, open unauthenticated introspection. Verified live 2026-08-30. Note that
the previously catalogued endpoint ecppec.ncl.ac.uk/api/ is a WordPress documentation page, not the API; the API is at
api-ecppec.ncl.ac.uk.
humanURL: https://ecppec.ncl.ac.uk/api/
baseURL: https://api-ecppec.ncl.ac.uk/
tags:
- Research Data
- History
- Open Data
- GraphQL
properties:
- type: GraphQL
url: graphql/newcastle-ecppec-schema.graphql
- type: x-graphql-descriptor
url: graphql/newcastle-ecppec-graphql.yml
- type: Documentation
url: https://ecppec.ncl.ac.uk/api/
- type: x-examples
url: examples/newcastle-ecppec-graphql-example.json
- type: x-vocabulary
url: vocabulary/newcastle-institution-vocabulary.yml
- type: Website
url: https://ecppec.ncl.ac.uk/
- aid: newcastle:etheses-oai
name: Newcastle University eTheses OAI-PMH Endpoint
x-operator: institution
x-operator-evidence: theses.ncl.ac.uk is under the university's own registrable domain and the Identify response names the
repository "Newcastle University eTheses" with adminEmail lib-web@nclac.uk. The repository software is DSpace, a third
party's; the deployment, the host and the endpoint are the institution's, which is what the operator axis measures.
description: An OAI-PMH 2.0 metadata harvesting interface over Newcastle University's electronic theses repository, running
on DSpace 6.3. Supports oai_dc, dim and the uketd_dc profile used by the UK Electronic Theses Online Service, with records
back to 2008-09-18. This is the institution's only working OAI-PMH endpoint — the interface previously catalogued at eprints.ncl.ac.uk
does not exist.
humanURL: https://theses.ncl.ac.uk/
baseURL: https://theses.ncl.ac.uk/oai/request
tags:
- Repository
- OAI-PMH
- Research Outputs
- Theses
- Open Data
properties:
- type: Documentation
url: https://theses.ncl.ac.uk/
- type: x-examples
url: examples/newcastle-etheses-oai-identify-example.xml
- type: x-conformance
url: conformance/newcastle-conformance.yml
- type: Website
url: https://theses.ncl.ac.uk/
- aid: newcastle:data-ncl
name: data.ncl Research Data Repository (Figshare tenancy)
x-operator: tenant
x-operator-evidence: data.ncl.ac.uk is a CNAME to figshare.com. The domain is Newcastle's and the data, the collections
and the DOIs are Newcastle's, but the API contract, the OAuth scheme and the DOI minting are Figshare's product. Figshare's
generic specification is deliberately NOT saved under this institution — this entry records the tenancy, which is a real
institutional fact, without crediting Newcastle for Figshare's engineering.
x-vendor: figshare
description: Newcastle University's institutional research data repository, operated for the university by Figshare on a
Newcastle-branded custom domain. Programmatic access exists but runs entirely on Figshare's API, authentication and DOI
infrastructure. Probing data.ncl.ac.uk from a non-browser client returns an empty HTTP 202 from the Figshare edge, a bot
challenge rather than a dead host.
humanURL: https://data.ncl.ac.uk/
tags:
- Research Data
- Open Data
- Repository
- Vendor Tenancy
properties:
- type: Website
url: https://data.ncl.ac.uk/
- type: Documentation
url: https://www.ncl.ac.uk/library/academics-and-researchers/lrs/rdm/sharing/datancl/
- aid: newcastle:urban-observatory-entity
name: Urban Observatory API (Urban Sciences Building) — Entity
x-operator: institution
x-operator-evidence: urbanobservatory.ac.uk is registered to the University of Newcastle upon Tyne (registrant Hostmaster,
Information Systems and Services, Claremont Tower), served from ns0.ncl.ac.uk and ns1.ncl.ac.uk, and api.usb.urbanobservatory.ac.uk
resolves to UOWEB4.ncl.ac.uk (128.240.212.174). The specification's contact is luke.smith@ncl.ac.uk. A different registrable
domain, entirely the institution's engineering.
x-surface: urban-observatory
x-surface-note: One contract, split per tag by refine-openapis. The four urban-observatory-* entries in this file are per-tag
views of the single OpenAPI archived at openapi/_original/newcastle-urban-observatory.yaml — not four separate APIs.
description: An entity ordinarily describes a spatial location, such as a room in a building or a pole in the street. In
some circumstances an entity may be a mobile piece of equipment, in which case the location is provided as a timeseries.
humanURL: https://api.usb.urbanobservatory.ac.uk/
baseURL: https://api.usb.urbanobservatory.ac.uk/api/v2.0a
tags:
- Entity
- Smart Cities
- Open Data
properties:
- type: OpenAPI
url: openapi/newcastle-entity-api-openapi.yml
- type: APIReference
url: https://api.usb.urbanobservatory.ac.uk/openapi.json
- type: Documentation
url: https://api.usb.urbanobservatory.ac.uk/
- type: JSONSchema
url: json-schema/newcastle-entity-schema.json
- type: x-vocabulary
url: vocabulary/newcastle-vocabulary.yml
- type: x-rules
url: rules/newcastle-rules.yml
- type: x-json-ld
url: json-ld/newcastle-context.jsonld
- type: x-examples
url: examples/newcastle-entity-list-example.json
- type: Website
url: https://urbanobservatory.ac.uk/
- aid: newcastle:urban-observatory-feed
name: Urban Observatory API (Urban Sciences Building) — Feed
x-operator: institution
x-surface: urban-observatory
description: A feed is a representation of a measurement or parametrisation, usually a metric, for example the observed
temperature.
humanURL: https://api.usb.urbanobservatory.ac.uk/
baseURL: https://api.usb.urbanobservatory.ac.uk/api/v2.0a
tags:
- Feed
- Smart Cities
- Open Data
properties:
- type: OpenAPI
url: openapi/newcastle-feed-api-openapi.yml
- type: Documentation
url: https://api.usb.urbanobservatory.ac.uk/
- type: JSONSchema
url: json-schema/newcastle-feed-schema.json
- type: x-vocabulary
url: vocabulary/newcastle-vocabulary.yml
- type: x-rules
url: rules/newcastle-rules.yml
- type: x-json-ld
url: json-ld/newcastle-context.jsonld
- type: Website
url: https://urbanobservatory.ac.uk/
- aid: newcastle:urban-observatory-summary
name: Urban Observatory API (Urban Sciences Building) — Summary
x-operator: institution
x-surface: urban-observatory
description: A compact summary view over Urban Sciences Building entities and the feeds attached to them.
humanURL: https://api.usb.urbanobservatory.ac.uk/
baseURL: https://api.usb.urbanobservatory.ac.uk/api/v2.0a
tags:
- Summary
- Smart Cities
- Open Data
properties:
- type: OpenAPI
url: openapi/newcastle-summary-api-openapi.yml
- type: Documentation
url: https://api.usb.urbanobservatory.ac.uk/
- type: JSONSchema
url: json-schema/newcastle-entitysummary-schema.json
- type: x-vocabulary
url: vocabulary/newcastle-vocabulary.yml
- type: x-rules
url: rules/newcastle-rules.yml
- type: x-json-ld
url: json-ld/newcastle-context.jsonld
- type: x-examples
url: examples/newcastle-summary-example.json
- type: Website
url: https://urbanobservatory.ac.uk/
- aid: newcastle:urban-observatory-timeseries
name: Urban Observatory API (Urban Sciences Building) — Timeseries
x-operator: institution
x-surface: urban-observatory
description: There may be more than one timeseries associated with a feed. Ordinarily there will be a plain timeseries representing
raw data from the device; in some cases there may be additional timeseries representing converted, corrected or temporally
aggregated values.
humanURL: https://api.usb.urbanobservatory.ac.uk/
baseURL: https://api.usb.urbanobservatory.ac.uk/api/v2.0a
tags:
- Time Series
- Smart Cities
- Open Data
tags_raw:
- Timeseries
- Smart Cities
- Open Data
properties:
- type: OpenAPI
url: openapi/newcastle-timeseries-api-openapi.yml
- type: Documentation
url: https://api.usb.urbanobservatory.ac.uk/
- type: JSONSchema
url: json-schema/newcastle-timeseries-schema.json
- type: JSONSchema
url: json-schema/newcastle-timeseriesentry-schema.json
- type: x-vocabulary
url: vocabulary/newcastle-vocabulary.yml
- type: x-rules
url: rules/newcastle-rules.yml
- type: x-json-ld
url: json-ld/newcastle-context.jsonld
- type: x-examples
url: examples/newcastle-timeseries-entry-example.json
- type: Website
url: https://urbanobservatory.ac.uk/
common:
- type: Website
url: https://www.ncl.ac.uk/
- type: GitHubOrganization
url: https://github.com/newcastleuniversity
- type: LinkedIn
url: https://www.linkedin.com/school/newcastle-university
- type: Twitter
url: https://x.com/UniofNewcastle
- type: IdentityFederation
url: https://gateway.ncl.ac.uk/idp/shibboleth
- type: ResearchRepository
url: https://eprints.ncl.ac.uk/
- type: ResearchRepository
url: https://theses.ncl.ac.uk/
- type: CourseCatalog
url: https://www.ncl.ac.uk/undergraduate/degrees/
- type: LibraryCatalog
url: https://www.ncl.ac.uk/library/special-collections/
- type: x-conformance
url: conformance/newcastle-conformance.yml
- type: Authentication
url: authentication/newcastle-authentication.yml
- type: x-scopes
url: scopes/newcastle-scopes.yml
- type: x-errors
url: errors/newcastle-errors.yml
- type: x-lifecycle
url: lifecycle/newcastle-lifecycle.yml
- type: AgenticAccess
url: agentic-access/newcastle-agentic-access.yml
- type: DomainSecurity
url: security/newcastle-domain-security.yml
- type: Plans
url: plans/newcastle-plans-pricing.yml
- type: RateLimits
url: rate-limits/newcastle-rate-limits.yml
- type: FinOps
url: finops/newcastle-finops.yml
- type: Review
url: review.yml
maintainers:
- FN: Kin Lane
email: kin@apievangelist.com
Discovery needs no key. Ratings and market analysis are Pro.
Get an API key
Free tier, no form to fill in. Signing in shares your email address with us — we
store it to create your key and to recognise you if you sign in with another
provider. See our Privacy Policy and
Terms.
Kin Score
How this is scored →