Contributing a new external authority

Overview

This documentation addresses contributing a new authority that accesses a non-linked data API for an authority. Not all the authorities have taken the same implementation approach. This document attempts to lay out the best practices for adding authorities to maximize the use of common method names.

Table of Contents

• Basic Actions
• Understanding Existing Authorities
  • Support Classes
  • Authorities
• Checklist for contributing an authority
  • Required for all authorities
  • Supporting Search
  • Supporting Term Fetch (aka Find)
  • Supporting Listing Terms (aka All)
  • Writing Documentation for the Authority

Basic Actions

All authorities are trying to support three basic functions...

Action	Route	Method Name	Purpose
search	search	@authority.search	Given a string query, return a set of results with terms matching the query.
fetch term	show	@authority.find	Given an id or URI, fetch data about a single term.
list terms	terms	@authority.all	Get a list of all terms for an authority.

Not all of these are supported by every authority. For #all, the list of terms may be too long to be supported and is either not implemented or returns a subset of the terms (e.g. first 1000 terms). For some cases, the authority's API may not support the #search, #find, or #all action.

Checklist for adding an authority

Required for all authorities

TBD

Supporting Search

Required

TBD

Optional

TBD

Supporting Term Fetch (aka Find)

TBD

Required

TBD

Optional

TBD

Supporting Listing Terms (aka All)

TBD

Required

TBD

Optional

TBD

Substitute in place of 'names' the namespace you will use to identify this vocabulary in the QA request URLs.