Metadata Services
Metadata services provide miscellaneous information about the data available via the NBA. For a full list of services, please refer to the API endpoint reference. Metadata services can be categorised into two classes:
Controlled Vocabularies
To maintain data integrity, some fields in our source systems are constrained by controlled vocabularies. These exist for the fields PhaseOrStage
, Sex
, SpecimenTypeStatus
(Specimens), TaxonomicStatus
(Taxa). The endpoint /medata/getControlledList/{field}
returns the allowed values for this field, e.g. for the type status:
https://api.biodiversitydata.nl/v2/metadata/getControlledList/SpecimenTypeStatus
Allowed formats for date fields can be retrieved with /metadata/getAllowedDateFormats. The service /metadata/getRestServices gives a list of all available NBA endpoints.
Type-specific Metadata
These services reside under /{dataType}/metadata
and give information about the field structure of the data type, such as all available paths (getPaths
) or detailed information about data types, allowed operators and whether a field is indexed or not (getFieldInfo
), for example:
https://api.biodiversitydata.nl/v2/multimedia/metadata/getPaths
https://api.biodiversitydata.nl/v2/multimedia/metadata/getFieldInfo