NatureServe Web Services Essentials

This page is for those who are confident with web services and just need to know the essential technical details. If you are new to web services, please see New to Web Services. If you need help deciding which service may be relevant, please see our Index of Services.

Essential Information

• All services use a RESTful interface
• Both GET and POST are supported
• POSTs should be form encoded as name=value pairs
• There is a 4000 character URL length limit for GET requests
• Parameter validation errors return HTTP 400
• All other errors return HTTP 500
• Output is in XML
• Character encoding is UTF-8
• An XML schema is available for all response types
• The xsi:schemaLocation attribute is populated, so the XML should validate without the need for local copies of the schemas
• All service descriptions contain working, live sample service calls