The Data Catalog API provides information about the thousands of development-relevant datasets available through the World Bank Data Catalog. The Data Catalog is built on the DKAN platform. DKAN provides a CKAN-compatible API for reading metadata from the data catalog; the World Bank’s Data Catalog API is based on this service.

All Data Catalog API endpoints follow the form:

https://datacatalog.worldbank.org/api/3/action/[action_name]

where action_name is one of the supported endpoints discussed below.

Changes from the CKAN-compatible API

API users should refer to the CKAN Dataset API, with the following changes and limits:

• Support is limited to the site_read, package_list, current_package_list_with_resources, package_show and resource_show endpoints

• package_list returns uuid strings as dataset identifiers instead of package names

• package_show and resource_show accept uuid’s, Drupal node IDs (nid’s) or the value from the name field as values for the id query parameter. All three are included in the response from these endpoints.

• For performance reasons, current_page_list_with_resources returns 150 packages by default instead of the entire package list. You will need to make multiple API calls to return the entire list, using the limit query parameter to adjust the response size, and the offset parameter to return sequential pages. A limit value of no more than 50 seems to provide reasonable performance. For example, the request below demonstrates how to return the 3rd page of 20 search results (i.e., datasets 41-60):

  https://datacatalog.worldbank.org/api/3/action/current_package_list_with_resources?limit=20&offset=40