API Access

ARCHE provides several interfaces to search and retrieve its data in programmatic ways.

SPARQL Endpoint

ARCHE exposes its data through a read only SPARQL-endpoint which can either be accessed directly (sending HTTP requests) or through a basic Graphical User Interface (GUI). Endpoint and GUI are provided by the ARCHE’s external triple store Blazegraph.

API: https://arche.acdh.oeaw.ac.at/blazegraph/sparql
GUI: https://arche.acdh.oeaw.ac.at/blazegraph/#query

OAI-PMH

ARCHE implements the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH). The corresponding endpoint can be found at https://arche.acdh.oeaw.ac.at/oai. Please consult the OAI-PMH specification for further information on how to interact with this endpoint.

If you want to get a list of all records in ARCHE you can try this:
https://arche.acdh.oeaw.ac.at/oai?verb=ListRecords&metadataPrefix=oai_dc

If you want to see information for a specific record you may for instance use this:
https://arche.acdh.oeaw.ac.at/oai?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=oai_dc&identifier=http://hdl.handle.net/21.11115/0000-000B-C715-D

ARCHE provides metadata in the following representations via OAI-PMH:

You can get a list of all supported metadata formats with this:
https://arche.acdh.oeaw.ac.at/oai?verb=ListMetadataFormats

Since resources in ARCHE cover a wide range of humanities data, OAI-PMH Sets were introduced to allow for selective harvesting. You can get a list of all sets with this:
https://arche.acdh.oeaw.ac.at/oai?verb=ListSets

IIIF

Images (TIF, PNG) stored in ARCHE can be accessed through the IIIF protocol. The IIIF endpoint is implemented with Loris IIIF Image Server. To actually access an image’s IIIF endpoint you will need to add the parameter ‘?format=iiif’ to the image’s identifier.

E.g. if you want to access the IIIF endpoint of the image resource with the Identifier: https://id.acdh.oeaw.ac.at/glasersqueezes2015/rec1110000910/AT-OeAW-BA-3-27-A-A845.png you simply need to append the afore-mentioned parameter:
https://id.acdh.oeaw.ac.at/glasersqueezes2015/rec1110000910/AT-OeAW-BA-3-27-A-A845.png?format=iiif

Alternatively you can simply click on the ‘IIIF Endpoint’ button displayed on the resource’s detail view page.

Please consult the IIIF Image API documentation for further information on how to interact with this endpoint.

Apache Solr

Solr is a widely used search platform. Metadata and text resources like PDFs or XML documents are indexed while imported into ARCHE with Solr. This index is used to provide a fulltext search. Solr also provides an API to its index. ARCHE’s Solr Index can be accessed at https://arche.acdh.oeaw.ac.at/solr/arche/query. Please refer to the Solr manual for a description of the query language used.

Please note that although we are trying to keep ARCHE’s Solr Index up to date, we can not guarantee that all resources are always indexed.

(GND) BEACON

BEACON is a file format to map local identifiers to external norm data records like VIAF or GND. A GND BEACON file for ARCHE can be found at https://arche.acdh.oeaw.ac.at/browser/sites/default/files/beacon.txt

Please note that this file is updated once a day but you can create an up-to-date version yourself by going to https://arche.acdh.oeaw.ac.at//browser/api/gnd?_format=json

ARCHE Entities JSON Endpoint

Basic JSON representations of ARCHE entities (Persons, Places, Organisations, Projects, Collections and Publications) can be retrieved through entity specific endpoints. The API is implemented with Drupal and the endpoints follow this URL schema:
https://<BaseURL>/browser/api/<EntityName>/<searchstring>?_format=json

These endpoints are primarily consumed for autocompletes by third party applications.

Examples

All persons named ‘Ines’:
https://arche.acdh.oeaw.ac.at/browser/api/persons/ines?_format=json

All organisations with ‘press’ in the title:
https://arche.acdh.oeaw.ac.at/browser/api/organisations/press?_format=json

All places called ‘Durbaib’:
https://arche.acdh.oeaw.ac.at/browser/api/places/Duraib?_format=json

All publications with ‘lang’ in the title:
https://arche.acdh.oeaw.ac.at/browser/api/publications/lang?_format=json

ARCHE Resources as RDF

RDF serialisations (.ttl) of ARCHE resources can be retrieved by appending a ‘format=rdf’ parameter to the resources’ identifier like in the example below:
https://id.acdh.oeaw.ac.at/glasersqueezes2015/rec1110000910/AT-OeAW-BA-3-27-A-A845.png?format=rdf

This RDF serialization is provided by Fedora which uses its own content negotiation logic. Therefore, when you try to access an URL like the one above through a browser, Fedora will return an HTML representation of the requested resource and NOT a .ttl representation. But if you send a GET request to the same URL with, for instance, CURL (or if you prefer some GUI you could use Postman) you will retrieve the RDF serialisation.

External Aggregators

The metadata for the resources stored in ARCHE is already being harvested via OAI-PMH by external aggregators.

  • CLARIN Virtual Language Observatory (VLO): collects language related resources. Click here to get an overview of ARCHE’s resources in VLO and click here to get to a more technical overview of the harvested records. The set provided by ARCHE can be found here
  • Kulturpool: collects digital Austrian cultural heritage assets. It also acts as a central data provider for Europeana. The harvested records are displayed here and can be found on Europeana as well. The set provided by ARCHE can be found here