Harvard Catalyst Profiles

Harvard Catalyst Profiles is a Semantic Web application, which means its content can be read and understood by other computer programs. This enables the data in profiles, such as addresses and publications, to be shared with other institutions and appear on other websites. If you click the "Export RDF" link on the left sidebar of a profile page, you can see what computer programs see when visiting a profile. The section below describes the technical details for building a computer program that can export data from Harvard Catalyst Profiles. There are four types of application programming interfaces (APIs) in Harvard Catalyst Profiles. RDF crawl. Because Harvard Catalyst Profiles is a Semantic Web application, every profile has both an HTML page and a corresponding RDF document, which contains the data for that page in RDF/XML format. Web crawlers can follow the links embedded within the RDF/XML to access additional content. SPARQL endpoint. SPARQL is a programming language that enables arbitrary queries against RDF data. This provides the most flexibility in accessing data; however, the downsides are the complexity in coding SPARQL queries and performance. In general, the XML Search API (see below) is better to use than SPARQL. However, if you require access to the SPARQL endpoint, please contact Griffin Weber. XML Search API. This is a web service that provides support for the most common types of queries. It is designed to be easier to use and to offer better performance than SPARQL, but at the expense of fewer options. It enables full-text search across all entity types, faceting, pagination, and sorting options. The request message to the web service is in XML format, but the output is in RDF/XML format. The URL of the XML Search API is https://connects.catalyst.harvard.edu/API/Profiles/Public/Search. Old XML based web services. This provides backwards compatibility for institutions that built applications using the older version of Harvard Catalyst Profiles. These web services do not take advantage of many of the new features of Harvard Catalyst Profiles. Users are encouraged to switch to one of the new APIs. The URL of the old XML web service is https://connects.catalyst.harvard.edu/ProfilesAPI. For more information about the APIs, please see the documentation and example files.