University of Pennsylvania
The University of Pennsylvania (Penn) is a private Ivy League research university in Philadelphia. Penn operates no central developer portal and publishes no institution-wide API program, and the surface that the 2026-06-03 profile treated as its headline API — the Penn OpenData API on the ISC enterprise service bus — is retired: the host esb.isc-seo.upenn.edu no longer resolves and its documentation page returns a soft-404. What Penn genuinely operates is library and identity infrastructure: the PennKey Shibboleth identity provider, whose signed SAML 2.0 metadata resolves live in the InCommon federation; ScholarlyCommons at Penn, a DSpace 7.6 repository on Penn's own domain serving a conformant OAI-PMH 2.0 endpoint over real Penn records; the Franklin catalog and the Colenda digital repository, both Blacklight applications with JSON twins on every page under Penn Libraries' published open-metadata policy; and OPenn, a bulk open-data site of manuscript images and TEI descriptions. The far larger and better known surface — Penn Course Alert, Penn Course Plan, Penn Course Review, Penn Degree Plan and Penn Clubs, with a live 45-path OpenAPI at penncourseplan.com/api/openapi/ — is NOT operated by the university. It is built and run by Penn Labs, a non-profit student-run software organization, on domains registered to Penn Labs. Penn's Office of Student Affairs adopted Penn Clubs as its official student-group registry, which is institutional endorsement of the product, not institutional operation of the API. Those surfaces are recorded here as tenant relationships so the relationship is preserved without crediting Penn for engineering it did not do.
Real signal across most facets with visible, nameable gaps — the contract exists but is thin, or the portal is good while governance and commercial terms are absent.
API Evangelist profiles University of Pennsylvania the way a machine reads it — 52 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 — University of Pennsylvania scores 40.1/100 (developing), with a separate agent-readiness read of 17/100 (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 2026-09-08 · rubric v0.20.0
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How we profile University of Pennsylvania
Each block below is one kind of artifact we hold for University of Pennsylvania. 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 10
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.
Penn Courses API (Penn Course Alert / Plan / Review / Degree Plan)
One API, four student-facing products: Penn Course Alert (PCA), Penn Course Plan (PCP), Penn Course Review (PCR) and Penn Degree Plan (PDP), plus a shared Accounts resource. The...
Penn Clubs API
JSON API behind Penn Clubs, the student-organization directory that Penn's Office of Student Affairs adopted as its official student-group registration system. /api/clubs return...
Penn SDK (Python)
Open-source Python client maintained by Penn Labs wrapping Penn data services. Published documentation at penn-sdk.readthedocs.io returned HTTP 200. An SDK is a client, not an i...
Penn SDK (JavaScript / Node)
Open-source JavaScript/Node client from Penn Labs. Documentation is hosted on js.org, a community subdomain service, at penn-sdk.js.org (HTTP 200) — a code/docs host, not a vend...
PennKey Identity Provider — SAML 2.0 / Shibboleth Metadata
Penn's Shibboleth identity provider publishes a signed SAML 2.0 EntityDescriptor at a well-known location (HTTP 200, application/xml, entityID https://idp.pennkey.upenn.edu/idp/...
ScholarlyCommons at Penn — DSpace REST API
DSpace 7.6 HAL+JSON REST API on Penn's own host. The API root returned HTTP 200 advertising dspaceName "ScholarlyCommons at Penn" and the full DSpace link relation set; content ...
Colenda Digital Repository — Search JSON
Penn Libraries' digital repository at colenda.library.upenn.edu exposes a Blacklight/Solr JSON search response (/catalog.json returned HTTP 200, ~59 KB, anonymous). Institution-...
OPenn — Open Manuscript Data
Penn Libraries' bulk open-data site publishing high-resolution manuscript images and TEI/XML descriptions in the public domain, laid out as a plainly-navigable directory tree (o...
University of Pennsylvania Catalog API
Bibliographic search and record retrieval.
University of Pennsylvania Request API
The Request API from University of Pennsylvania — 1 operation(s) for request.
Scroll within the panel for all 10 ·
Open Collections 26
Open, tool-agnostic collections carry the same runnable value as Postman without locking you to one client — the portable, forkable form of the same exercise.
Open, tool-agnostic API collections (OpenAPI-derived and Bruno).
API Collection
OPEN COLLECTIONPenn Courses API Documentation [Accounts] User [Accounts] User [PCA] Registration API
OPEN COLLECTIONPenn Courses API Documentation [Accounts] User [Accounts] User [PCA] Registration History API
OPEN COLLECTIONPenn Courses API Documentation [Accounts] User [Accounts] User [PCP] Course Recommendations API
OPEN COLLECTIONPenn Courses API Documentation [Accounts] User [Accounts] User [PCP] Primary Schedule API
OPEN COLLECTIONPenn Courses API Documentation [Accounts] User [Accounts] User [PCR] Autocomplete Dump API
OPEN COLLECTIONPenn Courses API Documentation [Accounts] User [Accounts] User [PCx] NGSS Restrictions API
OPEN COLLECTIONPenn Courses API Documentation [Accounts] User [Accounts] User [PCx] Pre-NGSS Requirements API
OPEN COLLECTIONPenn Courses API Documentation [Accounts] User [Accounts] User [PCx] Status Updates API
OPEN COLLECTIONPenn Courses API Documentation [Accounts] User [Accounts] User [PDP] Degree Plan Detail API
OPEN COLLECTIONPenn Courses API Documentation [Accounts] User [Accounts] User [PDP] Degree Plan Lists API
OPEN COLLECTIONPenn Courses API Documentation [Accounts] User [Accounts] User [PDP] Docked Course API
OPEN COLLECTIONScroll within the panel for all 26 ·
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.
University Of Pennsylvania 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.
Semantic 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.
Spectral Rules 2
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.
University of Pennsylvania API Rules
SPECTRALUniversity of Pennsylvania API Rules
SPECTRALJSON Schema 3
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.
JSON Structure 2
JSON Structure captures the data shapes in a form built for tooling — a complement to JSON Schema that keeps the model machine-legible.
JSON Structure definitions describing this provider's data shapes.
University Of Pennsylvania Course Structure
JSON STRUCTUREUniversity Of Pennsylvania Section Structure
JSON STRUCTUREExamples 2
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.
Agentic Access 1
An x-agentic-access contract marks which operations are safe for an agent to run on its own and which need a human in the loop. It is the difference between an API an agent can use and one it can use safely.
Recommended x-agentic-access execution contracts for AI agents.
Resources
Every other property we hold for University of Pennsylvania — 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
Agent Surfaces 1
MCP servers, agent skills, and machine-readable catalogs
Design & Contract 3
Pagination, idempotency, versioning, errors, and events
Build 4
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 1
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 6
Properties that don't map to a standard resource type
← All providers · Data indexed from github.com/api-evangelist/university-of-pennsylvania · machine-readable index on apis.io
This is an independent, third-party profile of University of Pennsylvania, 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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