California Institute of Technology
The California Institute of Technology (Caltech) is a private research university in Pasadena, California, ranked #10 in the QS World University Rankings 2025. Caltech's public, machine-readable footprint is concentrated in its research-data and astronomy infrastructure rather than a single central developer portal. CaltechDATA, the institutional research data repository, runs on InvenioRDM and exposes a public REST API and an OAI-PMH interface, with an accompanying open-source Python client. Caltech-operated IPAC runs the NASA/IPAC Infrared Science Archive (IRSA), which publishes Virtual Observatory (IVOA) standard APIs including TAP, Simple Cone Search, and Simple Image Access. There is no single unified institution-wide API developer portal; the official GitHub "caltech" org is an unofficial community group, while caltechlibrary and Caltech-IPAC host the bulk of the open-source code.
More than an index entry, but the surface is still mostly links rather than artifacts — the cohort most likely to move a full band from modest, well-targeted work.
API Evangelist profiles California Institute of Technology the way a machine reads it — 8 machine-readable artifacts across 3 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 23.1/100 (emerging), with a separate agent-readiness read of 7/100 (human only). 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.
Kin Score
How this is scored →scored 2026-07-27 · rubric v0.5
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 3
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 REST API
Public REST API for CaltechDATA, the Caltech institutional research data repository built on InvenioRDM. Supports querying and retrieving records, metadata (DataCite 4 JSON), fi...
CaltechDATA OAI-PMH
OAI-PMH metadata harvesting endpoint for CaltechDATA, enabling programmatic harvesting of repository metadata records. Verified live via the Identify verb.
IRSA Virtual Observatory APIs (IPAC)
Caltech/IPAC NASA Infrared Science Archive (IRSA) exposes IVOA-standard Virtual Observatory APIs, including Table Access Protocol (TAP), Simple Cone Search (SCS), and Simple Ima...
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 six things the Kin Score reads for commercial clarity.
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-LDSecurity Posture 1
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.
Build 1
SDKs, sample code, and the tooling you integrate with
Access & Security 1
Authentication, authorization, and security posture
Operate 1
Status, limits, changes, and where to get help
Commercial 2
Pricing, plans, and the legal terms of use
Company 2
The organization behind the API
Other 1
Properties that don't map to a standard resource type
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