University of Sheffield
The University of Sheffield is a public research university in Sheffield, United Kingdom, and a member of the Russell Group. Its programmable footprint is small, decentralised and mostly indirect, and this profile says so rather than padding it. There is no central developer portal, no API gateway, no self-service key issuance and no documented course, timetable or student-information API. What the institution genuinely operates is one first-party research API — the Sheffield Solar API at api.solar.sheffield.ac.uk, which publishes its own OpenAPI 3.1 document and serves keyless PV_Live estimates of GB solar generation — and its own Shibboleth SAML identity provider at idp.shef.ac.uk, the authentication surface through which every bought platform is reached. Everything else that looks like a Sheffield API is a vendor's contract running under Sheffield's name: ORDA is figshare, White Rose Research Online and White Rose eTheses Online are EPrints instances shared with Leeds and York, and library discovery is Ex Libris Primo. Those are recorded here as tenant relationships, which they are, and not as Sheffield engineering, which they are not.
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 Sheffield the way a machine reads it — 19 machine-readable artifacts across 1 API, 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 Sheffield scores 44.0/100 (developing), with a separate agent-readiness read of 26/100 (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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title="University of Sheffield on API Evangelist — API profile and Kin Score">
<img src="https://apis.io/badge/university-of-sheffield.svg"
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title="University of Sheffield on API Evangelist — API profile and Kin Score">
<img src="https://apis.io/badge/university-of-sheffield/card.svg"
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</a>More shapes, themes and sizes → · Score as JSON · How badges work
How we profile University of Sheffield
Each block below is one kind of artifact we hold for University of Sheffield. 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 5
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.
Sheffield Solar API
The University of Sheffield's own research API, built and run by the Sheffield Solar group in the Department of Physics and Astronomy. It publishes PV_Live — near-real-time and ...
University of Sheffield Shibboleth Identity Provider
The institution's own SAML 2.0 identity provider, entityID https://idp.shef.ac.uk/shibboleth, serving live Shibboleth metadata from Sheffield's own domain. Machine-readable, ins...
ORDA — Online Research Data (figshare tenant)
ORDA is the University of Sheffield's research data repository at orda.shef.ac.uk. The records, the DOIs and the curation are Sheffield's; the platform and the API contract are ...
White Rose Research Online OAI-PMH
White Rose Research Online is the shared open-access outputs repository of the Universities of Leeds, Sheffield and York, running on EPrints and administered by the White Rose c...
White Rose eTheses Online OAI-PMH
White Rose eTheses Online is the shared electronic theses repository of the same three universities, running on EPrints. Its OAI-PMH 2.0 interface Identifies as "White Rose eThe...
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 Sheffield 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 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.
University of Sheffield API Rules
SPECTRALJSON 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.
PVLiveGenerationRow
JSON SCHEMASheffieldSolarTabularResponse
JSON SCHEMAExamples 4
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.
Scopes 1
OAuth scopes are the vocabulary of least-privilege access. Profiling them shows exactly what an integration — or an agent acting on a user's behalf — is allowed to do.
OAuth scopes governing access to this provider's APIs.
Resources
Every other property we hold for University of Sheffield — 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 2
Reference material describing how the API behaves
Design & Contract 3
Pagination, idempotency, versioning, errors, and events
Build 5
SDKs, sample code, and the tooling you integrate with
Access & Security 3
Authentication, authorization, and security posture
Operate 3
Status, limits, changes, and where to get help
Commercial 5
Pricing, plans, and the legal terms of use
Company 3
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-sheffield · machine-readable index on apis.io
This is an independent, third-party profile of University of Sheffield, 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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