Orion

Orion (Roadmap ROR Integration) is a lightweight service designed to integrate the Research Organization Registry (ROR) into systems like Roadmap. Built in Go, Orion exposes a simple HTTP API for linking email domains to research organizations.

Built with efficiency and minimal resource consumption in mind, Orion avoids using a traditional database, aligning with principles of sustainable and lightweight infrastructure. Instead, it leverages a structured local filesystem-based storage to serve organization records and domain-to-ROR mappings.

This design enables fast, efficient lookups with minimal dependencies and overhead. This is ideal for lightweight deployments or containerized environments.

Getting Started

Requirements

• Go
• Docker (optional)
• Input data to generate ROR records and domain mappings

Generate Storage Data

Run the following to build the /storage structure used by the API:

go run json.go

This will create:

/storage/orgs/ → individual JSON files for each ROR ID

/storage/domains/ → hashed domain .txt files mapping to ROR IDs

Start the API Server

Locally:

go run api.go

Or in Docker:

docker build -t orion .

docker run -it --rm \
  -v $HOME/tmp/storage:/storage \
  -v $(pwd):/app \
  -w /app \
  -p 8080:8080 \
  orion bash

# then inside the container:
go run api.go

Testing the API

Once the server is running (either locally or inside Docker), you can test the endpoints using curl or tools like Postman.

Test 1: Search by Domain

This returns the list of ROR IDs associated with a domain.

Sample Request:

curl -X POST http://localhost:8080/submit \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
        "cmd": "search_by_domain",
        "value": "dcc.ac.uk"
      }'

Sample Response

{
  "ids": ["01k9d6864"],
  "orgs": [
    {
    ...

    "id": "https://ror.org/01k9d6864",
    "links": [
      {
        "type": "website",
        "value": "http://www.dcc.ac.uk/"
      },
      {
        "type": "wikipedia",
        "value": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Curation_Centre"
      }
    ],

    ...

    "names": [
      {
        "lang": null,
        "types": [
          "acronym"
        ],
        "value": "DCC"
      },
      {
        "lang": "en",
        "types": [
          "ror_display",
          "label"
        ],
        "value": "Digital Curation Centre"
      }
    ],

    ...
  }
  ]

Test 2: Search by ROR ID

This returns the full JSON record of a single organization.

Sample Request:

curl -X POST http://localhost:8080/submit \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
        "cmd": "search_by_ror_id",
        "value": "01k9d6864"
      }'

Sample Response:

[
  {
    ...

    "id": "https://ror.org/01k9d6864",
    "links": [
      {
        "type": "website",
        "value": "http://www.dcc.ac.uk/"
      },
      {
        "type": "wikipedia",
        "value": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Curation_Centre"
      }
    ],

    ...

    "names": [
      {
        "lang": null,
        "types": [
          "acronym"
        ],
        "value": "DCC"
      },
      {
        "lang": "en",
        "types": [
          "ror_display",
          "label"
        ],
        "value": "Digital Curation Centre"
      }
    ],

    ...
  }
]

Note: You can also send an array of ROR IDs to get multiple org records in one call.

Request format:

{
    "cmd": "search_by_ror_id",
    "value": ["rorID1", "rorID2"]
}

Response format:

[
  {
      ...
    "id": "https://ror.org/rorID1",
    "name": "First Organisation",
      ...
  },
  {
      ...
    "id": "https://ror.org/rorID2",
    "name": "Second Organisation",
      ...
  }
]

License

SPDX-License-Identifier: AGPL-3.0-or-later

Copyright © 2025 Digital Curation Centre (UK) and contributors