Personalized Greeting API

The Personalized Greeting API allows authenticated users to retrieve a greeting. The greeting is a JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) message. There are three types of greetings you can retrieve:

GET: /retrieve
Output: {greeting: "Hello World!"}
GET: /retrieve/Jim
Output: {greeting: "Hello Jim!"}
POST: /retrieve
Input: {"type": "Point", "coordinates": [-113.6246819, 37.0891407]}
Output: {greeting: "Hello to the kind people of St. George, Washington County, Utah, United States!"}

To use this API, you need to register credentials to authenticate yourself as a valid user. The only data collected at the registration is a username and a password. No other personal data is asked for. To try the Personalized Greeting API, you can view the interactive API documentation. The purpose of the Personalized Greeting API is to demonstrate two concepts:

Adding Basic Authentication to limit access for API methods.
Experiment with different ways to describe security controls.

The API provides several links to help you get started. The links above on Basic Authentication and describing security controls are meant to be an introductory tutorial on those concepts. The link for the interactive API allows developers to experiment with the API by providing credentials and trying the retrieve method. There are other methods in the API for retrieving the documentation. Developers can try those methods as well. One such method is an OpenAPI JSON document. Use the OpenAPI document with your favorite API stub tools to generate a stub that your own program can use to call the Personalized Greeting API.

The Open GeoSpatial Consortium (OGC) is an organization that develops GeoSpatial standards. I am a co-chair on a Standards Working group that is writing a standard to document security controls. One existing standard that OGC provides is the OGC API Commons Specification that defines conformance classes for documentation. Conformance classes are testable requirements that an API or web service may implement. Click here for a list of conformance requirements that this API adheres to.