A RESTful API for CERN’s LHC

The news came out this morning, the LHC of CERN is going to provide a RESTful API for anyone to be able to address the particles from the Web.

As an example, interested users can check the speed of any proton using URIs like:
http://cern.ch/LHC/hadrons/protons/1999998212321321321312372132137124081234312412341234/speed

April Bauer, head of communication at CERN said: “We expect people to quickly build mashups on top of this API”. When we asked for concrete examples she mentionned: “for instance a mashup with Google Map could show, in real-time of course, the position of any proton in the beam”.

For the records, a full speed the protons can travel up to 99.99% the speed of light thus, people might need to slightly increase the refresh rate of their screen in order to comfortably watch the mashups.

For more information please check the date of this post.