Heriot-Watt University
Heriot-Watt University is a public research university based in Edinburgh, Scotland, with further campuses in the Scottish Borders, Orkney, Dubai and Malaysia, ROR 04mghma93. Its programmable footprint is small but — unusually for this cohort — not empty and not entirely rented. Two surfaces are genuinely institution-operated and openly callable without credentials: the Research Output Service (ROS) at www.ros.hw.ac.uk, a DSpace 8 deployment on the university's own domain with a live OAI-PMH 2.0 endpoint and an unauthenticated DSpace REST/HAL API over its theses and research outputs; and the university's SAML 2.0 identity provider, registered in the UK Access Management Federation as Heriot-Watt University, whose signed metadata is machine-readable through the federation's MDQ service. Everything else that looks like a Heriot-Watt API is a vendor platform the university rents under its own name and is recorded here as a tenant relationship, not as Heriot-Watt engineering: the research portal at researchportal.hw.ac.uk is Elsevier Pure (the host CNAMEs to hwu.elsevierpure.com), library discovery at discovery.hw.ac.uk is Ex Libris Primo, canvas.hw.ac.uk is Instructure Canvas, and hw.ac.libcal.com is Springshare LibCal. Heriot-Watt operates no central developer portal, no public API documentation, no open-data portal and no course-catalog or timetabling API; the programme search at hw.ac.uk is server-rendered HTML with no JSON backend, and timetable.hw.ac.uk, though on the university's own network, exposes no reachable public endpoint.
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 Heriot-Watt University the way a machine reads it — 12 machine-readable artifacts across 6 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 — Heriot-Watt University scores 32.5/100 (thin), with a separate agent-readiness read of 3/100 (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. 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 2026-09-08 · rubric v0.20.0
Put this on your own site. The badge is drawn live from Heriot-Watt University's current Kin Score — paste it once and it updates itself every time the score is recomputed. It follows your visitor's light or dark setting, and it links back here so anyone who sees it can read the full breakdown.
<!-- Kin Score · API Evangelist -->
<a href="https://providers.apievangelist.com/providers/heriot-watt/"
title="Heriot-Watt University on API Evangelist — API profile and Kin Score">
<img src="https://apis.io/badge/heriot-watt.svg"
alt="Heriot-Watt University Kin Score — API readiness rating by API Evangelist" width="150" height="150" loading="lazy">
</a>[](https://providers.apievangelist.com/providers/heriot-watt/)<!-- Kin Score · API Evangelist -->
<a href="https://providers.apievangelist.com/providers/heriot-watt/"
title="Heriot-Watt University on API Evangelist — API profile and Kin Score">
<img src="https://apis.io/badge/heriot-watt/card.svg"
alt="Heriot-Watt University Kin Score — API readiness rating by API Evangelist" width="340" height="120" loading="lazy">
</a>More shapes, themes and sizes → · Score as JSON · How badges work
How we profile Heriot-Watt University
Each block below is one kind of artifact we hold for Heriot-Watt University. 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 6
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.
Heriot-Watt Research Output Service (ROS)
The university's own institutional repository of theses and research outputs, running DSpace 8 on www.ros.hw.ac.uk — a host under Heriot-Watt's registrable domain with a matchin...
Heriot-Watt University Identity Provider (UK Access Management Federation)
Heriot-Watt operates its own SAML 2.0 / Shibboleth identity provider and is a registered member of the UK Access Management Federation (registrationAuthority http://ukfederation...
Heriot-Watt Research Portal (Elsevier Pure)
Heriot-Watt's public research information portal — publications, projects, research data, activities and researcher profiles. It carries a hw.ac.uk hostname but is not instituti...
Heriot-Watt Library Discovery (Ex Libris Primo)
Library discovery and catalog search for Heriot-Watt's Edinburgh, Scottish Borders, Orkney, Dubai and Malaysia libraries, running Ex Libris Primo under the institution's view co...
Heriot-Watt Canvas (Instructure)
The university's virtual learning environment, an Instructure Canvas tenancy at canvas.hw.ac.uk (CNAME hwu-vanity.instructure.com). Canvas ships a documented REST API and LTI 1....
Heriot-Watt LibCal (Springshare)
Springshare LibCal tenancy for library room bookings, events and opening hours at hw.ac.libcal.com (CNAME region-eu.libcal.com). LibCal's REST API exists at this host — the OAut...
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.
Heriot Watt 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.
Heriot Watt 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.
Heriot Watt Context
JSON-LDSecurity 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 Heriot-Watt University — 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 1
Reference material describing how the API behaves
Design & Contract 1
Pagination, idempotency, versioning, errors, and events
Build 1
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 3
Status, limits, changes, and where to get help
Commercial 4
Pricing, plans, and the legal terms of use
Company 4
The organization behind the API
Other 4
Properties that don't map to a standard resource type
← All providers · Data indexed from github.com/api-evangelist/heriot-watt · machine-readable index on apis.io
This is an independent, third-party profile of Heriot-Watt University, 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.
info@apievangelist.com
·
Read the full data-sourcing policy →
On a security or compliance team? Put security in the subject line and
you will get a person, not a form — we will tell you exactly which public URLs this profile was built from.