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Using an Endpoint

If you are a researcher, educator or student on NDP, you do not need to install anything to use an Endpoint: you reach it through your normal NDP login and use its web interface or its API.

Where you reach an Endpoint

An Endpoint is its own destination: you reach it directly at its URL — typically https://<your-institution>/ep-api/ui/, given to you by your institution or by whoever shared a dataset hosted on it.

Endpoints are independent of the central NDP catalog. The catalog at nationaldataplatform.org only contains items that an Endpoint's writers have explicitly published upstream, going through Pre-CKAN (staging) and into the central catalog. Datasets that live only on an Endpoint are not visible from the central catalog unless someone publishes them there.

Signing in

The Endpoint reuses your existing NDP identity. You log in through CI Logon with your institutional account — the same flow as the central NDP. You do not create a separate Endpoint account, and commercial emails (Gmail, Outlook, etc.) are not eligible.

Once you are logged in, the Endpoint reads your identity and your role (more on roles in Requesting access and the role tiers). A user without a role can still see and search public data; write actions require an explicit role.

The Search experience

The Endpoint's home page is Search. You can:

  • Type free text to match across name, description and keywords.
  • Switch the category between All · Datasets · Services · Organizations.
  • Choose the catalog scope:
  • Local — only what this Endpoint publishes.
  • Global — the federated NDP catalog (results from many Endpoints).
  • Filter by organization or toggle Yours to see only items you own.

Results expand to show their description, tags, license, version, geographic extent (when present, drawn on a map) and the resources attached to each dataset.

Using a resource

A dataset can carry several kinds of resources, and each kind opens in the way you expect:

  • URL resources — a link to a file or service (CSV, JSON, NetCDF, …). Click to open or download.
  • S3 resources — a pointer to an object in S3-compatible storage. The Endpoint can generate a temporary presigned URL so you can fetch the object without having direct S3 credentials.
  • Kafka topics — a streaming data flow. The dataset page lists the broker host, port and topic so you can connect with a Kafka client.

What if you want to publish?

If your role is read-only ("viewer", or no role at all), the Endpoint will show your search results but will not show the + New menu or the S3 Management entry. To publish, you need to request access — see Requesting access and the role tiers.

Want to automate?

Anything you do through the web app is also available through the Endpoint's HTTP API (/ep-api/docs for interactive documentation) and through the ndp-ep Python library. See Automating with Python.