In November and December last year there was an interruption to the delivery of the SOAP web services when the ‘old’ Gateway database was moved onto new servers. The problem was fixed temporarily by moving the database back onto the old servers. We are very pleased to announce that the database has now been successfully installed on the new servers, and a database upgrade has ensured that this transition has not affected the delivery of SOAP services, which are performing well on the new servers.
The ‘old’ Gateway and associated SOAP web services and Web Map Services (WMS) will continue to run until March 2015, after which point they will no longer be available. However, we wish to encourage and support users to migrate to the new REST web services as soon as possible, because the data that is accessible via the SOAP web services is no longer being updated.
Information for Web Map Service users
If you are using old WMS URLs in your website or GIS, these will be replaced with the new ones which are documented here.
Re-direction is not possible, as the parameters are not compatible. For example, the code for a single species map of the Azure Hawker dragonfly would need to be changed from: http://gis.nbn.org.uk/arcgis/rest/services/grids/SingleSpeciesMap/NBNSYS0000005623
to: https://gis.nbn.org.uk/SingleSpecies/NBNSYS0000005623?
Information for SOAP and REST Web Service users
The REST services API is available to view and download here.
By the end of March 2014, we will also provide a set of documentation with working examples of how to implement the REST services in a number of programming languages (Javascript, PHP, Java and C#).
The documentation will include annotated source code for a range of examples, from a single species map or a species list for a 10km square, to more complex examples such as a list of species records for a user-defined polygon or a point and buffer. Each example will have a clear introduction covering the basics of making a REST call and interpreting the JSON response in each language, describing popular approaches and libraries used. For further information about what will be covered, see the documentation specification here. We hope this will be a useful resource for users wishing to adopt the new web services or to migrate existing systems.
In the meantime, if you have any queries about adopting the REST web services please use the NBN Forum.