There is currently a single BCI Restful service. If you would like more services or wish to feedback on this service please contact roger@biodiversitycollectionsindex.org.
This is an exceedingly simple service to lookup a collection code/abbreviation. It is designed for use by applications that may occasionally want to check a code such as when populating a user interface. It is not designed to be hit too frequently. If you have a large number of codes to lookup please download a CSV snapshot and use that locally - it will be a lot faster.
Simply call the following URI appending the code you wish to lookup.
http://www.biocol.org/rest/lookup/code/<your code>
e.g.
http://www.biocol.org/rest/lookup/code/CAS
The code is unlike to contain characters other than letters and numbers but if it does it should be URI encoded. The code is not treated as case sensitive but the rest of the URL (after the domain) is case sensitive.
Responses are all plain utf-8 text. The first line of the response body contains a key word indicating the response kind. Each subsequent line (if present) represents a single collection. Collection lines consist of the LSID for the collection followed by a tab followed by the proxied LSID for the collection followed by a tab followed by the name of the collection.
The three possible kinds of response are:
This service currently searches the Community (default) records for each collection. If you want to be able to search specific data provider records or all provider records please put in a request to the email address above.
The three fields supplied in the response are intended to enable the generation of database cached record for the collection or a human interface link (or both). If the proxied LSID (second field) is visited in a browser it will return a human readable web page. If it is visited by a non-browser application it will return RDF with further information about the collection.