How will web services be affected?
There are many different types of NBN web services. Some, such as the grid map service, can deliver ‘view only’ records from the NBN Gateway and display them as squares on a map. Others, however, can only deliver data which are publicly downloadable. We therefore hope that the removal of the ‘view only’ control will increase the amount of data that is available via web services.
Public-facing web services deliver data at the level of public access granted to users of the NBN Gateway. Password-controlled web services for registered users can deliver data to which enhanced access has been granted to those users. This will not change in the new system.
However, any changes to the levels of public or enhanced access set by the dataset administrators will have an effect on web services. If public access to a dataset is withdrawn, any web service that retrieves and displays public data would be affected.
We hope that most of the existing data access agreements will be transferred to the revised NBN Gateway access controls and that web services delivery will generally not be affected. It is unlikely that web service developers will need to update any of their code or parameters as a result of the proposed changes. However, because we are not aware of all instances of web service use we cannot guarantee this – please contact the NBN team if you have any specific queries.