About the project

The UK National Oceanographic Database (NODB) is a collection of marine data sets maintained by BODC, now accessible as Linked Open Data through our SPARQL endpoint. All data discoverable through the NODB SPARQL endpoint are available for 1-click download, or machine-to-machine delivery.

The NODB contains quality assured oceanographic data, collected using a variety of instruments and methods, and collated from many sources. The database includes biological, chemical, physical and geophysical data spanning tens of thousands of variables.

This endpoint has been created to act as an API for accessing BODC data, and so some knowledge of SPARQL is necessary to take full advantage of the service. A SPARQL endpoint is available at http://linked.bodc.ac.uk/, and this endpoint supports the full SPARQL 1.1 query language and the SPARQL 1.1 HTTP protocol. As such, the endpoint is able to accept both GET and POST requests. There are 2 available parameters:

Parameter	Expected value
query	The SPARQL query to be executed.
output	The format for the data to be returned as. The valid values are Text, JSON, XML, CSV, and TSV

The service can be accessed programmatically using http://linked.bodc.ac.uk/sparql/. For example, to return results from a basic query such as

select * where {?s ?p ?o . } limit 10

you might parse the results given from this request:

http://linked.bodc.ac.uk/sparql/?query=select+*+where+%7B%3Fs+%3Fp+%3Fo+.+%7D+limit+10&output=json