California Institute of Technology
The California Institute of Technology (Caltech) is a private research university in Pasadena, California, and one of the rare institutions in this cohort whose machine-readable footprint is genuinely its own rather than a vendor's contract running under its name. Caltech operates no central developer portal — neither api.caltech.edu nor developer.caltech.edu resolves — and publishes no OpenAPI, no llms.txt, no .well-known catalog and no status page. What it does operate is real research infrastructure on its own domain, engineered by four independent units with no shared convention between them: Caltech Library runs CaltechDATA and CaltechAUTHORS on self-hosted InvenioRDM, with public REST APIs, OAI-PMH 2.0 endpoints and DataCite DOIs minted under Caltech's own 10.22002 prefix; the Seismological Laboratory runs the Southern California Earthquake Data Center's FDSN web services; Caltech/IPAC runs three NASA archives — IRSA, NED and the NASA Exoplanet Archive — behind IVOA Virtual Observatory interfaces; and IMSS runs a Shibboleth identity provider registered in the InCommon federation. Five of the twelve education-regime domain standards are evidenced directly inside live Caltech contracts: shibboleth, saml, oai-pmh, datacite and orcid. The library discovery layer is the one genuinely outsourced surface, a Springshare tenancy at libguides.caltech.edu. The honest summary is that Caltech ships excellent open research data and almost no API product management around it.
Limited machine-readable signal and partial portal coverage — documentation a human can read, but little a machine or agent can consume without scraping.
API Evangelist profiles California Institute of Technology the way a machine reads it — 23 machine-readable artifacts across 4 APIs, pulled from the provider's own public surface and indexed so a developer, an analyst, or an AI agent can evaluate it against every other provider on the network.
Every provider in the network is reduced to the same set of machine-readable artifacts — OpenAPI contracts, event specifications, GraphQL schemas, runnable collections, pricing and rate-limit signals, security posture, OAuth scopes, and the agent surfaces (MCP servers and skills) that let software drive the API on its own. We profile them because the interface is the part of a company you can actually inspect: it is a truer signal of what a provider does than any marketing page. From those artifacts we compute the Kin Score — California Institute of Technology scores 32.1/100 (thin), with a separate agent-readiness read of 24/100 (agent aware). The full breakdown is below, followed by every artifact we hold — each card links through to its machine-readable definition on apis.io.
Kin Score
This is the API Evangelist rating — a single, repeatable read computed from the artifacts on this page. Green fill is points earned; the red track is points possible, so every bar shows earned-versus-possible at a glance. Every facet and dimension name is a link: it opens that measurement's page on APIs.io, where the rating runs across the whole catalog — the exact checks that feed it, how every profiled provider distributes on it, and who is at the top of it.
Kin Score
How this is scored →scored 2026-09-10 · rubric v0.20.0
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title="California Institute of Technology on API Evangelist — API profile and Kin Score">
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</a>More shapes, themes and sizes → · Score as JSON · How badges work
How we profile California Institute of Technology
Each block below is one kind of artifact we hold for California Institute of Technology. For each we say what it is and why it earns a place in the profile, then list every one we've indexed — capped at two rows, scroll within the panel for the rest.
APIs 13
Each API is captured as its own OpenAPI definition — every operation, parameter, and response. This is the single most useful machine-readable description of what an API does, and it's what lets us score, lint, mock, and generate against it without asking the provider for anything.
Individual APIs this provider publishes, each with its own machine-readable definition.
CaltechDATA OAI-PMH
OAI-PMH 2.0 metadata harvesting endpoint for CaltechDATA. Verified live 2026-08-19 via the Identify verb (repositoryName CaltechDATA, protocolVersion 2.0) and via ListMetadataFo...
CaltechAUTHORS REST API and OAI-PMH
Caltech's institutional publications repository, also on self-hosted InvenioRDM. Exposes the same REST record API and an OAI-PMH 2.0 endpoint, carrying ORCID and ROR identifiers...
Caltech Library Feeds
A metadata service built and operated by Caltech Library (v1.6), harvesting its institutional repositories, public directory and archival systems into static JSON datasets publi...
IRSA Virtual Observatory APIs (Caltech/IPAC)
The NASA/IPAC Infrared Science Archive exposes IVOA-standard Virtual Observatory interfaces — Table Access Protocol (TAP/ADQL), Simple Cone Search and Simple Image Access v2 — o...
NED Table Access Protocol (Caltech/IPAC)
The NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Database, operated by Caltech/IPAC, exposes an IVOA TAP service over its extragalactic object catalog. Verified live 2026-08-19 returning TAP_SCHEMA ...
NASA Exoplanet Archive TAP (Caltech/IPAC)
The NASA Exoplanet Archive, operated by Caltech/IPAC, exposes an IVOA TAP service over its confirmed-planet and related tables. Verified live 2026-08-19 returning real planet na...
Caltech Shibboleth Identity Provider (InCommon)
Caltech operates its own Shibboleth identity provider at idp.caltech.edu, asserting scoped attributes for caltech.edu. The SAML 2.0 metadata is machine-readable and publicly ret...
Caltech Library Guides (Springshare tenancy)
Caltech Library's discovery and research-guide layer runs on Springshare LibGuides/LibApps rather than on institution-operated software. Recorded as a real institutional relatio...
EBSCO Link Resolver (Caltech instance)
Caltech Library's OpenURL link resolver is an EBSCO tenancy — instance `l7ubco` on the shared host resolver.ebsco.com — referenced from Caltech's own library pages. Recorded as ...
California Institute of Technology Data Select API
Time-series waveform retrieval (fdsnws-dataselect).
California Institute of Technology Event API
Earthquake event catalog queries (fdsnws-event).
California Institute of Technology Records API
Published research data records, their metadata, files and DOIs.
California Institute of Technology Station API
Station and channel metadata queries (fdsnws-station).
Scroll within the panel for all 13 ·
Pricing Plans 1
Pricing is part of the interface. Machine-readable plans tell you what a tier costs and includes before you commit — one of the things the Kin Score reads for access clarity — renamed from commercial clarity in rubric 0.12, because a free statutory interface has access terms and no commercial ones.
Published pricing tiers and plan structures.
Rate Limits 1
Rate limits are the difference between a demo that works and a production integration that doesn't fall over. Publishing them is an operational-transparency signal — and a hard requirement for any agent that plans its own throughput.
Documented rate limits and quota policies.
Caltech Rate Limits
RATE LIMITSFinOps 1
Cost, billing, and metering signals let a buyer model the financial operations of an API before it's live. We profile them for the same reason we profile pricing: the money is part of the contract.
Cost, billing, and metering signals for API financial operations.
Caltech Finops
FINOPSSemantic Vocabularies 1
JSON-LD contexts give the data shared meaning across APIs. We profile them because semantics are what let a machine reconcile 'customer' here with 'customer' somewhere else.
JSON-LD contexts and semantic vocabularies used across these APIs.
Caltech Context
JSON-LDSpectral Rules 1
Governance rulesets we run against this provider's specs — the automated checks behind parts of the score. Profiling them makes the quality bar explicit and re-runnable, not a matter of opinion.
JSON Schema 2
Standalone JSON Schema definitions describe the data models behind the API. We profile them so the shapes are validatable on their own — useful long after a single request is forgotten.
Standalone JSON Schema definitions for this provider's data models.
CaltechDATA Record
JSON SCHEMACaltech Library Feeds — Person
JSON SCHEMAExamples 1
Real request and response payloads are what turn a spec from abstract into obvious — and they're one of the twelve things an agent needs to call an API correctly on the first try.
Example request and response payloads for these APIs.
Security Posture 2
Authentication, domain security, vulnerability disclosure, and trust-center signals — the evidence that a provider takes security seriously enough to document it. We profile it because you can't govern what you can't see.
Authentication, domain security, vulnerability disclosure, and trust-center signals.
Resources
Every other property we hold for California Institute of Technology — documentation, portals, status pages, policies, and corporate surface — grouped by the job it does, following the integrator's arc from getting started to running in production.
Documentation 4
Reference material describing how the API behaves
Design & Contract 6
Pagination, idempotency, versioning, errors, and events
Build 2
SDKs, sample code, and the tooling you integrate with
Access & Security 2
Authentication, authorization, and security posture
Learn 1
Tutorials, courses, talks, and written guidance
Operate 2
Status, limits, changes, and where to get help
Commercial 3
Pricing, plans, and the legal terms of use
Company 4
The organization behind the API
Other 7
Properties that don't map to a standard resource type
Scroll within the panel for all 7 ·
← All providers · Data indexed from github.com/api-evangelist/caltech · machine-readable index on apis.io
This is an independent, third-party profile of California Institute of Technology, published by API Evangelist. We do not operate, host, resell, or support these APIs, and we are not affiliated with or endorsed by the company unless stated above. Everything here is built from publicly available information — the company's own site, developer portal, documentation, public repositories, and the specifications it publishes for public use. Nothing is obtained by breaching a system, defeating an access control, or using credentials.
The Kin Score and Agent Readiness rating are independently calculated assessments of a company's public API artifacts, scored against a published rubric. They are not certifications, endorsements, security assessments, or audits.
Corrections, re-scores, and removal are free — no partnership or purchase required, and you do not need to justify the request. A removed company is recorded as unrated, never scored zero for having asked. Acknowledgement within one business day; removal within two.
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