Design of OCLC Web Services

As part of our efforts to build the WorldShare Platform, OCLC is standardizing the way in which our web services are exposed to developers. To do this we've developed the OCLC Data Protocol. Our protocol is REST-based, resource-oriented and shares many similarities with to the Atom Publishing Protocol. It supports a standard set of operations including

• Create
• Read
• Update
• Delete operations

It defines

• how HTTP response codes should be used in order to inform developers of the status of a given request, 
• standard query syntax and parameters which can be used to interact with all web services
• how services will output their data; including standard fields to be included in the data output.
• how content negotiation can be performed for different media-types. Currently the protocol supports two media type:
  • application/atom+xml
  • application/atom+json
• how resources should be versioned
• how web services should be versioned

This specification is the basis for new web services related to WorldShare Management Services. Existing web services such as the WorldCat Search API will be moved to conform to these specifications over time.