DataONE APIsΒΆ

The DataONE infrastructure exposes application programming interfaces (APIs) that support interaction between components (Coordinating Node`s, :term:`Member Node`s, and the :term:`Investigator Toolkit) and to support development of applications that interact with the DataONE infrastructure.

../_images/componentMethods.png

Figure 1. Overview of the system components and the methods being called by each component. An arrow to a target indicates the origin is calling the method on the target.

Services are implemented using a RESTful model using HTTP as the transport protocol and XML for encoding messages.

Member Nodes can expose different levels of functionality that equate to four different tiers while participating in the DataONE network. The tiers and Member Node APIs necessary to support are summarized in the table below. Also indicated are the corresponding Coordinating Node APIs that are necessary for functionality expressed for each tier.

Tier Description MN APIs CN APIs
1 Public read, no authentication or access control of content. No content can be created through the DataONE service interfaces. The node can not act as a replication target. MNCore, MNRead CNCore, CNRead
2 Read and resolve with access control support. Tier 1 + MNAuthorization CNAuthorization, CNRegister, CNIdentity
3 Write (create, update, delete), possibly limited support for data types Tier 2 + MNStorage  
4 Replication target. The types of content supported by the node may be limited to a subset of object formats. Tier 3 + MNReplication CNReplication

The specific methods that must be implemented for each tier are listed in the respective APIs.

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