An exploration of the DataONE API.

🚧 We're just messing around here, please don't expect anything here to be correct, re-usable, or even useful :)

Terms

See the glossary for a full listing.

• Node: An element of the DataONE federated architecture.
• Member Nodes: A node that users (or Coordinating Nodes) can publish data to or read data from.
• Coordinating Nodes: A node that provides a unifying abstraction over Member Nodes by storing metadata (not just in the usual sense, but also DataONE-specific things like "which member node has this data?"), enabling search, and doing other system housekeeping things. Content on Coordinating Nodes is replicated across all nodes.

Interfaces

• DataONE APIs

REST API

• REST Interface Overview: A general description.
• Coordinating Node APIs
• Member Node APIs

Python Client library

• Official docs

⚠️ BEWARE of a second copy of the docs at pythonhosted.org; they are significantly less useful than the ReadTheDocs site above.

Questions

• None of the clients have listQueryEngines method (curl https://cn.dataone.org/cn/v1/query).

Ideas

• An end-to-end tutorial for the Python client. I couldn't find something like this, so I had some immediate questions:
  • How do I import this? Because the pypi upload has a . in its name, you can't import the package by the same name it was installed. help() to the rescue (modules command)!