specification: API Commons Vocabulary
specificationVersion: '0.1'
provider: Harvard University
providerId: harvard
generated: '2026-08-19'
method: derived
source: >-
  Terms extracted from artifacts Harvard actually serves - the Dataverse OpenAPI at
  dataverse.harvard.edu/openapi, the LibraryCloud item response, the two OAI-PMH Identify
  responses, the InCommon SAML metadata, and the Legal Ed Skills Hub OpenAPI - 2026-08-19.
x-operator: institution
description: >-
  Harvard operates no institution-wide API vocabulary. What it has instead is five borrowed
  standard vocabularies, one per unit, plus one small vocabulary of its own. This artifact
  separates the two, because crediting Harvard for MODS or SAML would be crediting Harvard for
  the Library of Congress's and OASIS's work. Only the terms under `institution_terms` are
  Harvard's own coinage.
borrowed_vocabularies:
  - vocabulary: MODS (Metadata Object Description Schema)
    owner: Library of Congress
    used_by: Harvard Library LibraryCloud Item API
    evidence: examples/harvard-librarycloud-item-response.json
  - vocabulary: Dublin Core (oai_dc)
    owner: DCMI
    used_by: Harvard DASH and Harvard Dataverse OAI-PMH endpoints
    evidence: examples/harvard-dash-oai-identify.xml
  - vocabulary: OAI-PMH 2.0
    owner: Open Archives Initiative
    used_by: dash.harvard.edu, dataverse.harvard.edu
    terms: [verb, Identify, ListRecords, ListSets, GetRecord, resumptionToken, repositoryIdentifier, granularity, deletedRecord]
    evidence: examples/harvard-dataverse-oai-identify.xml
  - vocabulary: SAML 2.0 metadata + Shibboleth + REFEDS entity categories
    owner: OASIS / Internet2 / REFEDS
    used_by: Harvard University Shibboleth IdP
    terms: [EntityDescriptor, entityID, IDPSSODescriptor, SingleSignOnService, mdui:DisplayName, sirtfi, research-and-scholarship]
    evidence: examples/harvard-incommon-idp-metadata.xml
  - vocabulary: DSpace 7 HAL REST vocabulary
    owner: LYRASIS / DSpace community, deployed by 4Science
    x-operator: tenant
    used_by: dash.harvard.edu/server/api
    evidence: examples/harvard-dash-dspace-rest-root.json
  - vocabulary: Dataverse API vocabulary
    owner: >-
      Harvard's own Institute for Quantitative Social Science, as the authors of the Dataverse
      open-source project - this is the one borrowed vocabulary Harvard also wrote.
    used_by: dataverse.harvard.edu
    terms: [dataverse, dataset, datafile, persistentId, datasetVersion, harvestingClient, metadataBlock, guestbook, dataverseRole]
    evidence: openapi/_original/harvard-dataverse-openapi.yml
institution_terms:
  - term: persona
    definition: >-
      A named audience the Legal Ed Skills Hub organizes its pedagogical agent skills around -
      professor, student, pro-se, cle, skill-developer. Harvard LIL's own coinage.
    source: openapi/harvard-lil-legal-ed-skills-hub-openapi.yml
  - term: skill
    definition: >-
      A discrete, loadable set of instructions (a SKILL.md body plus metadata and reference
      documents) an agent fetches on demand for one persona.
    source: openapi/harvard-lil-legal-ed-skills-hub-openapi.yml
  - term: HarvardKey
    definition: >-
      Harvard's institution-wide credential, backed by the Shibboleth IdP at
      entityID https://fed.huit.harvard.edu/idp/shibboleth. It is the gate on the HUIT API
      Portal and therefore on every administrative API Harvard runs.
    source: https://portal.apis.huit.harvard.edu/
  - term: DASH
    definition: >-
      Digital Access to Scholarship at Harvard - the open-access institutional repository,
      running DSpace 7 on Harvard's own host.
    source: examples/harvard-dash-oai-identify.xml
  - term: LibraryCloud
    definition: >-
      Harvard Library's open metadata hub, aggregating bibliographic, image and finding-aid
      metadata behind a single unauthenticated Item API.
    source: https://library.harvard.edu/services-tools/harvard-library-apis-datasets
finding: >-
  The vocabulary picture is the operator picture in miniature. Four of six vocabularies Harvard
  serves are somebody else's; the fifth is Harvard's own but shared with every other Dataverse
  installation in the world; only the sixth, a 2026 experiment from a law-school lab, is
  vocabulary Harvard both wrote and exclusively operates.