generated: '2026-08-19'
method: probed
source: >-
  Deliberate error requests issued on 2026-08-19 against each
  institution-operated surface; the response bodies below are verbatim.
description: >-
  Error semantics observed on the University of Melbourne's institution-operated
  APIs. Nothing here is documented by the University — these shapes were
  discovered by asking each surface for something that does not exist. Three
  different error conventions are in use across three surfaces, none of them
  RFC 9457 Problem Details, and one of them (OAI-PMH) reports failure with
  HTTP 200.
surfaces:
  - name: Spatial Urban Data Observatory (SUDO) API v2
    x-operator: institution
    convention: Django REST Framework detail envelope
    problem_details: false
    cases:
      - request: 'GET https://sudo.eresearch.unimelb.edu.au/api/v2/datasets/999999999'
        status: 404
        content_type: application/json
        body: '{"detail":"Not found."}'
      - request: 'GET https://sudo.eresearch.unimelb.edu.au/api/v2/openapi'
        status: 404
        content_type: text/html; charset=utf-8
        body: >-
          GeoNode HTML 404 page (49,138 bytes). Recorded because it is the
          answer to "does this institution publish a machine-readable contract
          for its own API" — it does not. /api/v2/swagger.json is also 404.
      - request: 'GET https://sudo.eresearch.unimelb.edu.au/api/v2/categories?page_size=2'
        status: 0
        detail: >-
          Timed out with no bytes received after 60 seconds on 2026-08-19,
          while /api/v2/ and /api/v2/datasets answered normally in the same
          minute. Recorded as an availability defect, not as an error contract.
      - request: 'TLS handshake to sudo.eresearch.unimelb.edu.au:443'
        status: 0
        detail: >-
          Certificate subject CN=staging.unimelb-sudo.cloud.edu.au with
          subjectAltName DNS:staging.unimelb-sudo.cloud.edu.au only. Any
          standards-conformant client refuses the connection to the production
          hostname. Every probe above required verification to be disabled.
  - name: Minerva Access DSpace REST API
    x-operator: institution
    convention: Spring Boot error envelope
    problem_details: false
    cases:
      - request: 'GET https://minerva-access.unimelb.edu.au/server/api/core/communities/00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000'
        status: 404
        content_type: application/json;charset=UTF-8
        body: >-
          {"timestamp":"2026-08-19T21:33:06.523+00:00","status":404,
          "error":"Not Found","message":"An exception has occurred",
          "path":"/server/api/core/communities/00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000"}
        notes: >-
          The `message` field is generic ("An exception has occurred") and
          carries no actionable information; the `path` field echoes the
          request path back to the caller.
  - name: Minerva Access OAI-PMH
    x-operator: institution
    convention: OAI-PMH 2.0 in-envelope error element
    problem_details: false
    cases:
      - request: 'GET https://minerva-access.unimelb.edu.au/server/oai/request?verb=Bogus'
        status: 200
        content_type: text/xml;charset=UTF-8
        body: '<error code="badVerb">Illegal verb</error> inside the OAI-PMH envelope'
        notes: >-
          Correct per the OAI-PMH 2.0 specification, which mandates HTTP 200
          with an in-envelope error. Flagged for consumers who status-check
          rather than parse: a failed harvest here is indistinguishable from a
          successful one at the HTTP layer.
  - name: findanexpert.unimelb.edu.au
    x-operator: unknown
    convention: soft-404
    problem_details: false
    cases:
      - request: 'GET https://findanexpert.unimelb.edu.au/api'
        status: 200
        content_type: text/html; charset=utf-8
        body: >-
          Vue single-page-application shell, 17,520 bytes. A 200 that is not a
          resource. Recorded explicitly so no future pass credits this path as
          an API surface.