Purpose

Welcome to the NG Beta API, which has been set-up to allow direct access to structured, linkable data describing the National Gallery Collection. The data has initially been provided in the form of a basic json array, but work is currently under way to fully map the data to the CIDOC CRM and provide a standard semantic presentation of the data.

These web pages have been set up to provide examples of how the system works in a human readable form, but the system is generally designed to be called directly by other computer systems.

At this time all of the text data display via this API is provided under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Basic URL Format - NG API

NG data URLs take the form:

namespace/AAA-AAAA-AAAA

where:

• The namespace is:
  • https://data.ng-london.org.uk/resource/
• A is any alphanumeric character and together they represent a unique NG PID.
• The first set of three characters act as a prefix, indicating what kind of entity is being described by the PID.
• The remaining characters are arbitrary and just form the rest of the PID.
  • Initially we will be using 8 additional characters: which will allow for 36⁸ possibilities per prefix.
  • The system has been built to allow additional sets of 4 characters to be added to scale the number further if required.
• The search option, provided on this page can be used to find NG PIDs based on names, titles, inventory numbers, etc.