---
name: Newcastle University
description: Newcastle University public developer/API footprint review for APIs.json cataloging.
url: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/api-evangelist/newcastle/refs/heads/main/review.yml
created: '2026-06-03'
modified: '2026-08-30'
reviews:
  - date: '2026-08-30'
    rating: 3
    summary: >-
      Re-profiled under the university pipeline, which settles WHO OPERATES each surface before
      saving any contract. Four institution-operated APIs were verified live and one vendor tenancy
      was identified and re-labelled rather than credited. New this pass: the Digitised Objects
      Repository publishes its own OpenAPI at /info/open-api (18 paths, harvested); the ECPPEC API
      is a GraphQL server at api-ecppec.ncl.ac.uk with open introspection (19 root queries,
      harvested to SDL); and Newcastle operates a Shibboleth SAML 2.0 identity provider registered
      in the UK Access Management Federation with 168 service providers under ncl.ac.uk — the
      institution's largest machine-readable surface and one no previous pass had recorded. Two
      June claims did not survive probing and were corrected. Expect the score to move on the
      strength of real harvested contracts, not on volume.
    endpoints:
      - url: https://api.usb.urbanobservatory.ac.uk/api/v2.0a/sensors/entity
        status: 200
        note: Urban Observatory entity collection, 616 entities returned anonymously.
      - url: https://api.usb.urbanobservatory.ac.uk/openapi.json
        status: 200
        note: First-party OpenAPI served by the API itself.
      - url: https://api-dor.ncl.ac.uk/info/open-api
        status: 200
        note: First-party OpenAPI, 18 paths, harvested into openapi/_original/.
      - url: https://api-dor.ncl.ac.uk/v1/digitised-objects?page.size=2
        status: 200
        note: 15,482 digitised objects across 7,741 pages.
      - url: https://api-dor.ncl.ac.uk/v1/collections/ZZZZZZ
        status: 404
        note: 'Clean error contract: {"error":{"code":"RESOURCE_NOT_FOUND",...}}.'
      - url: https://api-ecppec.ncl.ac.uk/
        status: 200
        note: >-
          GraphQL over POST. Open introspection, 19 root queries, live data returned. The June pass
          read this host's bare-GET 400 as a dead host; it is a live server refusing a malformed
          request.
      - url: https://theses.ncl.ac.uk/oai/request?verb=Identify
        status: 200
        note: OAI-PMH 2.0, DSpace 6.3, repositoryName "Newcastle University eTheses".
      - url: https://gateway.ncl.ac.uk/idp/shibboleth
        status: 200
        note: SAML 2.0 IdP metadata, scope ncl.ac.uk, UK Access Management Federation.
      - url: https://eprints.ncl.ac.uk/cgi/oai2?verb=Identify
        status: 404
        note: >-
          Redirects to error_page.aspx. eprints.ncl.ac.uk is a live Newcastle service but is not
          EPrints software and exposes no OAI-PMH; the June claim was wrong and has been removed.
      - url: https://ecppec.ncl.ac.uk/api/
        status: 200
        note: WordPress documentation page, not the API. Kept as Documentation only.
      - url: https://data.ncl.ac.uk/
        status: 202
        note: >-
          Figshare tenant (CNAME to figshare.com). Empty 202 to non-browser clients is a bot
          challenge, not a dead host. Re-labelled x-operator: tenant.
      - url: https://newcastle.urbanobservatory.ac.uk/api/v1.1/sensors/json/
        status: 200
        note: >-
          Soft-200 — a 661-byte SPA shell, not data. The older v1.1 API is gone from this host with
          no redirect or tombstone.
      - url: https://www.ncl.ac.uk/llms.txt
        status: 404
        note: No llms.txt.
      - url: https://www.ncl.ac.uk/.well-known/security.txt
        status: 404
        note: No security.txt.
      - url: https://github.com/newcastleuniversity
        status: 200
        note: Verified official GitHub org, 20 public repos, no API specifications among them.
  - date: '2026-06-03'
    rating: 3
    summary: >-
      Newcastle University has no single central developer portal, but several
      real public APIs were verified live: the Urban Observatory REST API (with
      a reachable OpenAPI spec at /openapi.json), the Digitised Objects
      Repository Search and Data API, and the ECPPEC electoral research API. The
      Figshare-powered data.ncl research repository and EPrints repositories
      (eprints/theses) are live and expose standard programmatic access. A
      verified GitHub org exists (domain-verified to ncl.ac.uk). No endpoints
      were fabricated; the apex api-ecppec host returned 400 so only the
      documented humanURL form was cataloged.
    endpoints:
      - url: https://api.usb.urbanobservatory.ac.uk/
        status: 200
        note: Urban Observatory API reference, live.
      - url: https://api.usb.urbanobservatory.ac.uk/openapi.json
        status: 200
        note: OpenAPI specification, reachable.
      - url: https://api-dor.ncl.ac.uk/
        status: 200
        note: Digitised Objects Repository Search and Data API, live.
      - url: https://ecppec.ncl.ac.uk/api/
        status: 200
        note: ECPPEC API documentation page, live.
      - url: http://api-ecppec.ncl.ac.uk/
        status: 400
        note: ECPPEC API apex host returns 400; not cataloged as a baseURL.
      - url: https://data.ncl.ac.uk/
        status: 202
        note: data.ncl Figshare research data repository, live (Cloudflare 202).
      - url: https://eprints.ncl.ac.uk/
        status: 200
        note: EPrints institutional repository, live (OAI-PMH capable).
      - url: https://theses.ncl.ac.uk/
        status: 200
        note: EPrints electronic theses repository, live.
      - url: https://github.com/newcastleuniversity
        status: 200
        note: Verified official GitHub org (domain ncl.ac.uk), ~20 repos.
      - url: https://www.ncl.ac.uk/
        status: 200
        note: Official institutional website.
      - url: https://www.linkedin.com/school/newcastle-university
        status: 200
        note: Official LinkedIn school page.
---