# Seoul National University

**Canonical:** https://apis.io/providers/snu/  
**Website:** https://en.snu.ac.kr/  
**APIs profiled:** 5

Seoul National University (SNU) is South Korea's flagship national research university, a national university corporation in Seoul ranked in the QS World top 40 and identified by ROR as https://ror.org/04h9pn542. Like most universities it is a federation of buyers rather than a producer of APIs: it operates no developer portal, no open-data portal, no API gateway, no official GitHub organization, and no OAuth or OIDC authorization server. It publishes no API documentation of any kind, and every contract in this repository was written from live probing rather than from something SNU wrote. What it does operate — verified on its own hosts and its own address block on 2026-08-19 — is four machine-readable surfaces. Two OAI-PMH 2.0 data providers: S-Space, the SNU Open Repository and Archive (DSpace 5.5, content from 2008, twelve metadata formats, 100+ sets, three harvesting contexts including OpenAIRE and DRIVER), and KOSSDA, the Korea Social Science Data Archive (DSpace 5.6, content from 2017). An OpenSearch 1.1 search interface over S-Space. And a SAML 2.0 Identity Provider, entityID https://kafegw.snu.ac.kr/idp/simplesamlphp, registered in the KAFE national federation and exported into eduGAIN with REFEDS Research & Scholarship support and a Sirtfi assurance assertion — the single most consequential programmable surface the institution runs, and one no catalog had recorded. Two honest limits belong in the same breath. The repository hosts front everything except OAI-PMH with a JavaScript bot challenge that returns HTTP 200 and an HTML shell to any machine client, so the OpenSearch interface is gated rather than open. And SNU's library discovery runs on Ex Libris Alma and Primo under institution code 82SNU — real, but a tenancy, recorded below as such and never scored as SNU's engineering.

## Kin Score — 52.0 / 100 (developing)

Scored 2026-08-20 under rubric 0.12.0. Trend: rising (+34.9 from 17.1).

| Facet | Score |
|---|---|
| Discoverability | 74.1 |
| Contract Quality | 63.2 |
| Governance | 67.4 |
| Contract Governance | 67.4 |
| Operational Transparency | 21.1 |
| Developer Ergonomics | 16.7 |
| Commercial Clarity | 39.5 |
| Access Clarity | 39.5 |

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

## Agent readiness — 32.9 (agent-aware)

| Dimension | Value |
|---|---|
| Spec Presence | yes |
| Agentic Access | no |
| Reversibility Documented | no |
| MCP Server | no |
| Auth Clarity | yes |
| Idempotency | no |
| Error Semantics | no |
| OpenAPI Examples | verified |
| 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

Free — onboarding: unknown, pricing: free, trial: no (confidence: high).

## APIs (5)

- **S-Space OAI-PMH Repository Interface** — OAI-PMH 2.0 metadata harvesting for S-Space, the SNU Open Repository and Archive. Verified live and anonymous on 2026-08-19: repositoryName "SNU Open Repository and Archive", re...
- **KOSSDA OAI-PMH Repository Interface** — OAI-PMH 2.0 metadata harvesting for KOSSDA (한국사회과학자료원), the Korea Social Science Data Archive at Seoul National University — SNU's social-science research data archive, listed i...
- **Seoul National University SAML 2.0 Identity Provider** — SNU's federated identity provider, entityID https://kafegw.snu.ac.kr/idp/simplesamlphp, registered by the Korea Access Federation (registrationAuthority http://kafe.kreonet.net,...
- **S-Space OpenSearch Interface** — OpenSearch 1.1 search over the SNU Open Repository and Archive. A description document is served at /open-search/description.xml as application/opensearchdescription+xml with Lo...
- **SNU Library Discovery (Ex Libris Primo / Alma) — tenancy** — Seoul National University Library runs library management and discovery on Ex Libris Alma and Primo, institution code 82SNU / 82SNU_INST, on the institution-specific host snu-pr...

## Security (2)

- **Snu Authentication** — none/saml2 · 3 schemes
- **Snu Domain Security** — TLSv1.3 · HSTS · DMARC

## Plans (1)

- **Snu Plans Pricing**

## Tags

University, Higher Education, Education, South Korea, Research, Research Data, Institutional Repository, Research Repository, Identity Federation, OAI-PMH, SAML, Open Access, Library, National University

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