University of Pittsburgh

aid: university-of-pittsburgh
name: University of Pittsburgh
description: 'The University of Pittsburgh is a public research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, ranked #271 in the
  QS World University Rankings 2025. It operates no central developer portal, no API gateway and no institution-wide developer
  program — developer.pitt.edu and apis.pitt.edu do not resolve, and www.pitt.edu serves neither apis.json nor llms.txt. What
  it does operate is four unrelated machine-readable surfaces built by four different units that share no identifier, no envelope,
  no error model and no case convention: Project Tycho, a global epidemiological surveillance API at www.tycho.pitt.edu built
  in the Public Health Dynamics Laboratory; the Western Pennsylvania Regional Data Center, a CKAN 2.11.6 open data portal
  led by Pitt''s UCSUR in partnership with Allegheny County and the City of Pittsburgh; the University Library System''s E-Journal
  Publishing platform, a self-hosted PKP Open Journal Systems estate on ULS''s own machines serving conformant OAI-PMH 2.0
  across dozens of journals and 14,470 Crossref-registered DOIs; and Pitt Passport, the campus Shibboleth SAML 2.0 identity
  provider registered in InCommon and eduGAIN. None of the four publishes an OpenAPI, a changelog, a deprecation policy or
  a status page, and Project Tycho serves a rejected credential with HTTP 200 and an HTML sentence. Two further surfaces carrying
  Pitt''s name are tenancies rather than Pitt''s engineering: D-Scholarship@Pitt is now a Hyku Commons tenant (d-scholarship.pitt.edu
  CNAMEs to pittir.hykucommons.org), and PittAPI is an unofficial library written by a student club. This profile was rebuilt
  on 2026-08-30 under the university pipeline, which settles who operates a surface before saving anything about it.'
type: Index
deliveryModel:
  model: saas
  open_source: false
  commercial: false
  callable_host: true
  label: Hosted service · you call their endpoint
  confidence: medium
  source:
  - openapi
  - authentication
  generated: '2026-08-30'
  method: probed
accessModel:
  pricing: free
  onboarding: self-service
  trial: false
  try_now: true
  public: true
  label: Free · Registration required for Project Tycho, none for the rest
  confidence: high
  source:
  - authentication
  - openapi
  generated: '2026-08-30'
  method: probed
position: Producing
access: Public
image: https://kinlane-images.s3.amazonaws.com/shared/apis-json/icons/university-of-pittsburgh.png
url: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/api-evangelist/university-of-pittsburgh/refs/heads/main/apis.yml
tags:
- University
- Higher Education
- Education
- United States
- Public Research University
- Research Data
- Open Data
- Epidemiology
- Public Health
- Civic Data
- Scholarly Publishing
- Institutional Repository
- Library
- Identity Federation
- OAI-PMH
- Open Access
created: '2026-06-03'
modified: '2026-08-30'
specificationVersion: '0.23'
x-type: university
x-category: Public Research University
apis:
- aid: university-of-pittsburgh:project-tycho
  name: Project Tycho API
  description: 'Project Tycho is an open-access repository for global health surveillance data, built and run at the University
    of Pittsburgh and served from www.tycho.pitt.edu. It holds case counts for 78 notifiable conditions in the United States,
    dengue for 100 countries and COVID-19 for 237 countries, standardized into the Project Tycho Pre-compiled Data Format
    version 1.0. The API is fourteen GET endpoints returning CSV: thirteen listings that enumerate the controlled values of
    each variable in that format, and /query, which returns the surveillance rows filtered on any of them. Every call carries
    a free API key in the query string. The site is maintained for Project Tycho by the MIDAS Coordination Center under NIH/NIGMS
    grant R24GM153920 and is copyright University of Pittsburgh. Pitt publishes no machine-readable contract for it; the OpenAPI
    in this repository was written by API Evangelist from Pitt''s own published reference.'
  humanURL: https://www.tycho.pitt.edu/dataset/api/
  baseURL: https://www.tycho.pitt.edu/api
  tags:
  - Research Data
  - Health
  - Epidemiology
  - Public Health
  - Surveillance
  x-operator: institution
  x-operator-evidence: www.tycho.pitt.edu is under the University of Pittsburgh's own registrable domain and resolves to 136.142.8.172,
    inside Pitt's own 136.142.0.0/16. The site footer reads "© 2026 University of Pittsburgh"; the published contact is tycho@phdl.pitt.edu
    (Public Health Dynamics Laboratory, Pitt School of Public Health). No vendor host, contact or terms appear on the surface,
    and no other institution in the university cohort ships this contract.
  properties:
  - type: OpenAPI
    url: openapi/university-of-pittsburgh-project-tycho-api-openapi.yml
  - type: Documentation
    url: https://www.tycho.pitt.edu/dataset/api/
  - type: APIReference
    url: https://www.tycho.pitt.edu/dataset/api/
  - type: JSONSchema
    url: json-schema/university-of-pittsburgh-project-tycho-data-row.json
  - type: Examples
    url: examples/university-of-pittsburgh-project-tycho-requests.json
  - type: Signup
    url: https://www.tycho.pitt.edu
- aid: university-of-pittsburgh:wprdc-ckan
  name: Western Pennsylvania Regional Data Center (WPRDC) CKAN API
  description: WPRDC is a regional open data portal led by the University Center for Social and Urban Research (UCSUR) at
    the University of Pittsburgh, in partnership with Allegheny County and the City of Pittsburgh and funded by the Richard
    King Mellon Foundation. Its own Data Use Agreement names the University as the operating party. The portal runs CKAN 2.11.6
    on infrastructure the project operates itself, with a local `wprdctheme` extension alongside datastore, spatialdata, dcat
    and datapusher_plus, and it exposes the CKAN Action API keyless for read plus a DCAT-US 1.1 catalog at /data.json and
    JSON-LD at /catalog.jsonld. Recorded as institution-operated because Pitt runs the deployment — but the API contract itself
    is CKAN's upstream design, not Pitt's engineering, so no generic CKAN OpenAPI is saved under this institution's name.
  humanURL: https://data.wprdc.org
  baseURL: https://data.wprdc.org/api/3/action
  tags:
  - Open Data
  - CKAN
  - Civic Data
  - Regional Data
  - DCAT
  x-operator: institution
  x-operator-evidence: https://data.wprdc.org/about names WPRDC "a project led by the University Center of Social and Urban
    Research (UCSUR) at the University of Pittsburgh". /api/3/action/status_show returns CKAN 2.11.6 carrying the site-specific
    `wprdctheme` extension, which is a locally operated and locally customised deployment rather than a hosted tenancy; the
    host resolves to an EC2 instance the project runs, not to a vendor's shared platform. The registrable domain is wprdc.org
    rather than pitt.edu because the portal belongs to the three-way partnership, which is why the cohort audit could not
    attribute it from the hostname alone.
  x-contract-designer: CKAN (open source), not the University of Pittsburgh
  properties:
  - type: Documentation
    url: https://data.wprdc.org
  - type: JSONSchema
    url: json-schema/university-of-pittsburgh-wprdc-ckan-action-envelope.json
  - type: Examples
    url: examples/university-of-pittsburgh-wprdc-ckan-status-show.json
  - type: OpenData
    url: https://data.wprdc.org/data.json
- aid: university-of-pittsburgh:uls-ejournal-oai
  name: ULS E-Journal Publishing — OAI-PMH 2.0 providers
  description: 'The University Library System publishes dozens of open-access journals on PKP Open Journal Systems that ULS
    self-hosts, each with a conformant OAI-PMH 2.0 provider on a pitt.edu host. anthro-age.pitt.edu resolves through ojs-prod-01-VIP.library.pitt.edu
    to 136.142.156.212 — ULS''s own machine, named for the service it runs. Identify reports protocolVersion 2.0 and adminEmail
    anthro-age@mail.pitt.edu; ListMetadataFormats advertises oai_dc, marcxml, oai_marc and rfc1807; ListRecords returns real
    records. The same pattern answers at jwsr.pitt.edu, jmla.pitt.edu, cinej.pitt.edu and at least seven further journal hosts.
    ULS is not merely a consumer of this software: the ulsdevteam GitHub organization holds 299 public repositories, including
    OJS/PKP plugins ULS itself wrote. The OJS REST API alongside each provider is closed to the public (HTTP 403 api.403.unauthorized);
    the OAI-PMH surface is open. Discovered 2026-08-30 — this surface was entirely absent from the June 2026 profile.'
  humanURL: https://www.library.pitt.edu/publishing-open-access
  baseURL: https://anthro-age.pitt.edu/ojs/anthro-age/oai
  tags:
  - Scholarly Publishing
  - OAI-PMH
  - Open Access
  - Library
  - Metadata Harvesting
  x-operator: institution
  x-operator-evidence: anthro-age.pitt.edu CNAMEs to ojs-prod-01-VIP.library.pitt.edu and resolves to 136.142.156.212, inside
    Pitt's own address space; the admin contact in the Identify response is a mail.pitt.edu address; the software is self-hosted
    PKP OJS and the ULS development team publishes its own plugins for it at github.com/ulsdevteam ("University of Pittsburgh
    - University Library System"). Crossref member 3176, "University Library System, University of Pittsburgh", holds prefix
    10.5195 with 14,470 works whose DOIs resolve back to these same pitt.edu hosts.
  properties:
  - type: Documentation
    url: https://www.library.pitt.edu/publishing-open-access
  - type: Examples
    url: examples/university-of-pittsburgh-uls-oai-pmh-identify.xml
  - type: Conformance
    url: conformance/university-of-pittsburgh-education-standards-conformance.yml
- aid: university-of-pittsburgh:pitt-passport-idp
  name: Pitt Passport (Shibboleth SAML 2.0 Identity Provider)
  description: The University of Pittsburgh's campus-wide single sign-on identity provider. Its SAML 2.0 metadata is publicly
    readable at the canonical Shibboleth /idp/shibboleth location, declares the shibmd namespace and asserts <shibmd:Scope>pitt.edu</shibmd:Scope>,
    with OrganizationName "University of Pittsburgh" and four contacts at pitt.edu. It is a registered InCommon — and thereby
    eduGAIN — entity, and InCommon's MDQ service returns a signed EntityDescriptor for it with a machine-readable validUntil.
    An authentication service for relying service providers, not a data API, and the surface that makes the shibboleth and
    saml conformance hits in this repository real. Discovered 2026-08-30 and absent from the June 2026 profile.
  humanURL: https://passport.pitt.edu
  baseURL: https://passport.pitt.edu/idp/shibboleth
  tags:
  - Identity Federation
  - Authentication
  - SSO
  - Shibboleth
  - SAML
  - InCommon
  x-operator: institution
  x-operator-evidence: entityID https://passport.pitt.edu/idp/shibboleth is under Pitt's own registrable domain; the metadata's
    OrganizationName and OrganizationDisplayName are "University of Pittsburgh"; its four ContactPerson entries are helpdesk@pitt.edu,
    ric@pitt.edu and abj@pitt.edu; its asserted scope is pitt.edu; and it is registered in InCommon as Pitt's entity. Federation
    membership is an institution-operated fact by definition.
  x-operator-caveat: 'Hosting may be outsourced even though the entity is not, and the cohort audit disagrees with the verdict
    recorded above. Run with --resolve, audit-university-contracts.py grades this surface `tenant`, because passport.pitt.edu
    CNAMEs to pitt.idaccessmanage.com (35.167.61.51, 44.233.206.84) — an institution-specific subdomain on a registrable domain
    that is not pitt.edu, which is the mechanical definition of a tenancy. Both verdicts are recorded here rather than one
    of them being suppressed. `institution` is kept because everything the surface says about itself is Pitt''s — entityID,
    OrganizationName, all four contacts, the asserted scope, the InCommon registration and the TLS certificate (CN=passport.pitt.edu,
    issued by Amazon) — and because idaccessmanage.com could not be shown to be a shared vendor platform: it is registered
    through Amazon Registrar, serves nothing at its apex, and of eleven likely institutional subdomains probed on 2026-08-30
    only `pitt.` resolved, so the cohort-derived vendor test that governs this pipeline does not fire. A reader who weighs
    the CNAME above the metadata should read this surface as `tenant`; the evidence for both readings is above.'
  properties:
  - type: Metadata
    url: https://passport.pitt.edu/idp/shibboleth
  - type: Metadata
    url: https://mdq.incommon.org/entities/https%3A%2F%2Fpassport.pitt.edu%2Fidp%2Fshibboleth
  - type: Examples
    url: examples/university-of-pittsburgh-pitt-passport-saml-metadata.xml
- aid: university-of-pittsburgh:d-scholarship-oai
  name: D-Scholarship@Pitt Institutional Repository (Hyku Commons) — tenant
  description: 'D-Scholarship@Pitt is the University Library System''s institutional repository of research and scholarly
    output. The content, the collections and the DataCite DOIs are Pitt''s; the platform and the OAI-PMH provider are Hyku
    Commons''. d-scholarship.pitt.edu CNAMEs to pittir.hykucommons.org, the repository identifies itself as "pittir" with
    repositoryIdentifier "hyku", and its earliest datestamp is 2026-01-26 — a migration completed this year, corroborated
    by the ULS repositories eprints-hyku-reconciliation, eprints-to-hyku-data-tool, hyku-metadata-profile and csv2hyku. The
    OAI-PMH endpoint is live and open at /catalog/oai: Identify, ListMetadataFormats (oai_dc, oai_hyku) and ListRecords all
    return HTTP 200 with real records. Recorded as a tenancy, which is what it is. The June 2026 profile recorded this as
    an institution-operated EPrints endpoint at /cgi/oai2 and reported it bot-blocked; that path is the stale pre-migration
    one and still returns HTTP 403 behind a Cloudflare challenge. The working endpoint was one path away and the operator
    was wrong.'
  humanURL: https://www.library.pitt.edu/d-scholarship
  baseURL: https://d-scholarship.pitt.edu/catalog/oai
  tags:
  - Institutional Repository
  - OAI-PMH
  - Library
  - Research Data
  - Tenant
  x-operator: tenant
  x-vendor: Hyku Commons (Samvera Hyku)
  x-vendor-evidence: d-scholarship.pitt.edu CNAME pittir.hykucommons.org (dig, 2026-08-30), fronted by Cloudflare. Identify
    at https://d-scholarship.pitt.edu/catalog/oai?verb=Identify returns repositoryName "pittir", repositoryIdentifier "hyku",
    sampleIdentifier oai:hyku:806bbc5e-…, and the response is served by blacklight_oai_provider — Hyku's OAI implementation,
    not Pitt's. adminEmail is d-scholarship@mail.pitt.edu, which is Pitt's stewardship of a vendor's deployment.
  properties:
  - type: Documentation
    url: https://www.library.pitt.edu/d-scholarship
  - type: APIReference
    url: https://d-scholarship.pitt.edu/catalog/oai?verb=Identify
- aid: university-of-pittsburgh:pittapi
  name: PittAPI (Pitt Computer Science Club) — student-built
  description: 'PittAPI is an unofficial, community-maintained Python library published by the Pitt Computer Science Club
    that scrapes University of Pittsburgh web sources for courses, dining, library, news, laundry, computer labs, shuttle
    routes, the people directory and textbooks. It is a client library, not an API: there is no endpoint, no contract and
    no service behind it, and the data it reaches is served by Pitt web pages that were never designed to be called. It exists
    because Pitt''s own campus-life data has no public API — psmobile.pitt.edu''s class search returns HTTP 500 behind Pitt
    Passport to an unauthenticated client. Recorded as `tenant` rather than `institution` per the pipeline''s rule for student-built
    surfaces on a non-institution domain: the data is Pitt''s, the software is not, and no pitt.edu endorsement of the library
    was found. The June 2026 profile recorded it as one of the university''s four APIs.'
  humanURL: https://github.com/pittcsc/PittAPI
  tags:
  - Courses
  - Campus Data
  - Library
  - Python
  - Student Built
  - Tenant
  x-operator: tenant
  x-endorsement: unverified
  x-vendor-evidence: github.com/pittcsc is the "Pitt Computer Science Club (CSC)" organization with blog https://pittcsc.org.
    The project's own README describes it as unofficial. It is distributed on PyPI under GPLv2 and is not referenced from
    any pitt.edu developer surface.
  properties:
  - type: Documentation
    url: https://github.com/pittcsc/PittAPI
  - type: SourceCode
    url: https://github.com/pittcsc/PittAPI
  - type: Package
    url: https://pypi.org/project/PittAPI/
common:
- type: License
  name: GPL-2.0
  url: https://github.com/pittcsc/PittAPI/blob/dev/LICENSE
- type: Website
  url: https://www.pitt.edu
- type: Documentation
  url: https://www.tycho.pitt.edu/dataset/api/
- type: APIReference
  url: https://www.tycho.pitt.edu/dataset/api/
- type: OpenData
  url: https://data.wprdc.org
- type: OpenData
  url: https://data.wprdc.org/data.json
- type: OpenData
  url: https://www.ucsur.pitt.edu/western-pennsylvania-regional-data-center-wprdc
- type: ResearchRepository
  url: https://www.library.pitt.edu/d-scholarship
- type: ResearchRepository
  url: https://www.cadb.pitt.edu/
- type: ResearchRepository
  url: https://www.library.pitt.edu/publishing-open-access
- type: LibraryCatalog
  url: https://pittcat.pitt.edu
- type: LibraryCatalog
  url: https://www.library.pitt.edu
- type: CourseCatalog
  url: https://catalog.upp.pitt.edu
- type: IdentityFederation
  url: https://passport.pitt.edu/idp/shibboleth
- type: IdentityFederation
  url: https://mdq.incommon.org/entities/https%3A%2F%2Fpassport.pitt.edu%2Fidp%2Fshibboleth
- type: ResearchComputing
  url: https://crc.pitt.edu
- type: AIPolicy
  url: https://www.technology.pitt.edu/ai
- type: AITooling
  url: https://www.technology.pitt.edu/services/pitt-ai
- type: GitHubOrganization
  url: https://github.com/ulsdevteam
- type: GitHubOrganization
  url: https://github.com/University-of-Pittsburgh
- type: SourceCode
  url: https://github.com/pittcsc/PittAPI
- type: Status
  url: https://status.pitt.edu
- type: PrivacyPolicy
  url: https://www.pitt.edu/privacy-policy
- type: Support
  url: https://www.technology.pitt.edu/help
- type: Blog
  url: https://www.pitt.edu/pittwire
- type: LinkedIn
  url: https://www.linkedin.com/school/university-of-pittsburgh/
- type: OpenAPI
  url: openapi/university-of-pittsburgh-project-tycho-api-openapi.yml
- type: Conformance
  url: conformance/university-of-pittsburgh-education-standards-conformance.yml
- type: Authentication
  url: authentication/university-of-pittsburgh-authentication.yml
- type: OAuthScopes
  url: scopes/university-of-pittsburgh-scopes.yml
- type: ErrorCatalog
  url: errors/university-of-pittsburgh-errors.yml
- type: Lifecycle
  url: lifecycle/university-of-pittsburgh-lifecycle.yml
- type: Vocabulary
  url: vocabulary/university-of-pittsburgh-vocabulary.yml
- type: JSONSchema
  url: json-schema/university-of-pittsburgh-project-tycho-data-row.json
- type: JSONSchema
  url: json-schema/university-of-pittsburgh-wprdc-ckan-action-envelope.json
- type: Examples
  url: examples/university-of-pittsburgh-examples-manifest.yml
- type: Rules
  url: rules/university-of-pittsburgh-rules.yml
- type: DataModel
  url: json-ld/university-of-pittsburgh-context.jsonld
- type: DomainSecurity
  url: security/university-of-pittsburgh-domain-security.yml
- type: Plans
  url: plans/university-of-pittsburgh-plans-pricing.yml
- type: RateLimits
  url: rate-limits/university-of-pittsburgh-rate-limits.yml
- type: FinOps
  url: finops/university-of-pittsburgh-finops.yml
- type: Review
  url: review.yml
maintainers:
- FN: Kin Lane
  email: kin@apievangelist.com
x-coverage:
  state: covered
  reason: covered
  generated: '2026-08-30'
  method: probed
  detail: 'Six surfaces were settled by live probe on 2026-08-30 before anything was saved: four institution-operated and
    two tenancies. Two of the four are first-time finds that the June 2026 profile and the cohort host audit could not have
    seen — the University Library System''s self-hosted OJS estate, whose OAI-PMH 2.0 providers answer on at least eleven
    separate pitt.edu journal hosts backed by 14,470 Crossref DOIs, and Pitt Passport, the campus Shibboleth SAML 2.0 identity
    provider registered in InCommon. Two of the four surfaces the June profile did carry were re-graded: D-Scholarship@Pitt
    is not an institution-operated EPrints repository but a Hyku Commons tenant (d-scholarship.pitt.edu CNAMEs to pittir.hykucommons.org),
    and the /cgi/oai2 path recorded for it is the stale pre-migration one, still returning HTTP 403 behind Cloudflare while
    the live endpoint at /catalog/oai returns 200 with real records; and PittAPI is not one of Pitt''s APIs but an unofficial
    Python library written by a student club against Pitt web pages. Project Tycho survives as a genuine institution-designed
    API and now carries a fourteen-path OpenAPI, a JSON Schema and a request example set derived from Pitt''s own published
    reference. Five of the twelve education-regime domain standards are satisfied with evidence — oai-pmh, shibboleth, saml,
    datacite and crossref — four of them by institution-operated surfaces. What is genuinely absent is a program: no developer
    portal (developer.pitt.edu and apis.pitt.edu do not resolve), no gateway, no apis.json, no llms.txt, no OpenAPI published
    by Pitt for any surface, no changelog, no deprecation policy, and a status page at status.pitt.edu that covers none of
    these APIs. One verdict is contested and recorded as contested: the cohort audit run with --resolve grades Pitt Passport
    `tenant` because passport.pitt.edu CNAMEs to pitt.idaccessmanage.com, while every self-description in its SAML metadata
    is Pitt''s; the disagreement and both bases are written into that surface''s x-operator-caveat rather than resolved silently.'
  evidence:
  - url: https://www.tycho.pitt.edu/api/condition?apikey=INVALIDKEY
    status: 200
  - url: https://www.tycho.pitt.edu/dataset/api/
    status: 200
  - url: https://data.wprdc.org/api/3/action/status_show
    status: 200
  - url: https://data.wprdc.org/data.json
    status: 200
  - url: https://anthro-age.pitt.edu/ojs/anthro-age/oai?verb=Identify
    status: 200
  - url: https://anthro-age.pitt.edu/ojs/anthro-age/oai?verb=ListRecords&metadataPrefix=oai_dc
    status: 200
  - url: https://anthro-age.pitt.edu/ojs/anthro-age/api/v1/issues
    status: 403
  - url: https://passport.pitt.edu/idp/shibboleth
    status: 200
  - url: https://mdq.incommon.org/entities/https%3A%2F%2Fpassport.pitt.edu%2Fidp%2Fshibboleth
    status: 200
  - url: https://d-scholarship.pitt.edu/catalog/oai?verb=Identify
    status: 200
  - url: https://d-scholarship.pitt.edu/cgi/oai2?verb=Identify
    status: 403
  - url: https://api.datacite.org/clients/pitt.uls
    status: 200
  - url: https://api.crossref.org/members/3176
    status: 200
  - url: https://developer.pitt.edu
    status: 0
  - url: https://apis.pitt.edu
    status: 0
  - url: https://www.pitt.edu/llms.txt
    status: 404
  - url: https://www.pitt.edu/apis.json
    status: 404
  - url: https://psmobile.pitt.edu/app/catalog/classSearch
    status: 500
x-enrichment:
  pipeline: pipeline-university
  generated: '2026-08-30'
  method: probed
  note: Rebuilt under the university pipeline on 2026-08-30. Operator attribution was settled for every surface before any
    artifact was written; two surfaces were re-graded from institution to tenant and two institution-operated surfaces were
    added. Expect this profile to read differently from the June 2026 one in both directions — more real surfaces, fewer credited
    APIs.