PODD also provides Web Services, implemented via RESTful APIs, as a means to support automated interaction with PODD. AAF based users are able to access PODD via a Web Service using their institutional credentials. Currently there is a login service that allows a user to authenticate against their PODD based credentials. There will be also a service to allow a user to authenticate against their AAF based credentials.

First, the user makes a call to the authentication service /podd/aafLogin and pass the following key value pairs:

• loginid: login id of the user
• password: password of the user
• home institution: identifies the home institution through which the users identity is validated. One assumes it would be in the form of a URL/URI, e.g. www.uq.edu.au, or uq.edu.au.

Then the following Status codes should be returned (these are tomcat codes, and may need adaptation):

• 200: Success
• 400: Bad Request: invalid URI or an object with the given URI does not exist, invalid filename
• 401: Unauthorized: user is not authorized to access the objects requested
• 500: Internal Server Error: an error occurred while accessing the database or creating the file to return

On successful completion a session will be created and maintained for subsequent accesses. A blank JSON array should be returned.

On failure a JSON array containing a detailed error message should be returned.