Data communication through web services is a prerequisite for digital solutions and is therefore necessary to improve government services for individuals and businesses.

Organizations should therefore consider implementing web services on top of the data they are responsible for. They should also consider how to increase automation by using web services from others.

A number of web services are available through the x-road Service catalog.

X-road

X-road is an open data transfer layer that allows organizations to exchange information over the Internet. X-Road is a centrally managed distributed Data Exchange Layer between information systems. Organizations can exchange information over the Internet using X-Road to ensure confidentiality, integrity and interoperability between data exchange parties.

X-road supports service providers to access control their own web services, as well as accessing web services of others. Access can be provided for entire web services or for specific endpoints.

For setting up x-road security server, you need to apply through an application. More technical information can be found in the development handbook.

Design of web services

We recommend that organizations implement web services using a "RESTful" architecture based on simple HTTP and JSON queries. Digital Iceland publishes API design guide, which contains recommendations on naming conventions, data types, error handling, documentation, version controls, and much more.

It is highly recommended to document web services with OpenAPI (Swagger). It simplifies the registrations of the web service in X-road, and will become available in the service catalog. The documentation is particularly useful for developers implementing the web service, but OpenAPI documentation allows for automatic generation of implementation code in most development environments.

When it comes to version control, it is important not to introduce breaking changes to the web services that have been released to the production environment. Changes to endpoints or attributes that are not backward compatible must be published in a new version of the web service on a new URL.

More information can be found in the API design guide.