VLO API made available

CLARIN announces the public availability of the VLO API as part of the recent VLO 4.15 release. The VLO API offers machine-readable access to the contents of the Virtual Language Observatory. It follows REST principles and offers a set of distinct resources described below.

VLO API resources

Searchable list of records: /api/records

The records are sorted by relevance as they are in the VLO API and provided one page at a time. The from and size parameters control the pagination. For example: Making sure you're not a bot!

Use the q parameter to get query results. For instance: https://vlo.clarin.eu/api/records?q=name:ParlaMint

Use the fq parameter to filter the results. Only facet fields are supported. For instance: https://vlo.clarin.eu/api/records?fq=languageCode:code:lav

Get an individual record: /api/records/{id}

Retrieve all details for a record by id. For instance: https://vlo.clarin.eu/api/records/https_58__47__47_www.nb.no_47_sprakbanken_47_oai_63_verb_61_GetRecord_38_identifier_61_oai_58_nb.no_58_sbr-77_38_metadataPrefix_61_cmdi

Getting the CMDI metadata: …/cmdi

Get the original CMDI XML for a record by id. For instance: https://vlo.clarin.eu/api/records/https_58__47__47_www.nb.no_47_sprakbanken_47_oai_63_verb_61_GetRecord_38_identifier_61_oai_58_nb.no_58_sbr-77_38_metadataPrefix_61_cmdi/cmdi

Get facets: /api/facets

Facet values and counts for the most common values of the defaults facets can be retrieved at the resource without parameters: https://vlo.clarin.eu/api/facets

Optionally, you can add q or fq parameters to get the facet values and counts for the records within the results with the provided queries and filters applied. For instance: https://vlo.clarin.eu/api/facets?q=Belgium

Learn more / try it out!

The API is documented with OpenAPI. Interactive documentation is available at https://vlo.clarin.eu/api. Here you will be able to try out the API directly from the browser.

Note that some of the resources are still being implemented, or require special permissions to execute. You wil encounter an error message if you try to access these.

The API is also included in CLARIN’s API portal at https://infra.clarin.eu/apis.

Other changes

The API was made available as part of the VLO 4.15 release. Other changes includes a full migration to Bootstrap 5.x and various bug fixes and security updates. For details, see the release notes.

We are looking forward to any examples, demonstrations etc. of usage of this API. And of course we are happy to take your feedback or answer any questions. You can reply to this forum post, but are also welcome to send us an e-mail at vlo@clarin.eu!