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What is the Data API?

The N3 Data API (Data-as-a-Service) gives your organisation programmatic, read-only access to the data held in your N3 environment — projects, risk assessments, development appraisals, benchmark snapshots, report metadata and anonymised community analytics. It is designed for integrations such as data warehouses, BI dashboards, portfolio reporting tools and scheduled exports. Every request is scoped to a single N3 environment. The environment is determined entirely by your API key — it is never passed in the URL — so a key can only ever see the data belonging to the environment it was issued for.
The Data API is served from a dedicated service, separate from the main N3 platform API. All endpoints are GET requests in the current version.

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Base URL

Your N3 contact or environment administrator will confirm the base URL for your deployment when your key is issued. All endpoint paths in this guide are relative to the base URL.

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Authentication

Authenticate every request with a Data API key in the x-api-key header. Data keys always start with the prefix n3_data_.

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Obtaining a key

Data API keys are issued by the N3 team. Ask your N3 contact for a key for your environment. The full key is shown once at creation — store it securely (for example in a secrets manager). If a key is lost it cannot be recovered; revoke it and create a new one. Keys can be deactivated, reactivated or permanently revoked by your environment administrator at any time.
Only Data API keys (n3_data_ prefix) work on /data/* endpoints. Platform keys, system keys and user session tokens are rejected. Likewise, a Data API key cannot be used against the main platform API.

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Scopes

Each key carries a set of scopes controlling which endpoint groups it may call: New keys are granted data:projects, data:benchmarks and data:reports by default. The data:community scope must be granted explicitly. Calling an endpoint without the required scope returns 403 Forbidden:
GET /data/quota requires no scope — any valid Data API key can check its own status. You can see the scopes granted to your key in the scopes field of the quota response.

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Response conventions

  • All responses are JSON.
  • Identifiers (id, project_id, environment_id, …) are serialised as strings.
  • Timestamps are ISO 8601 (UTC).
  • Nullable fields are returned as null, never omitted.
  • Monetary values are numbers in the environment’s working currency (GBP unless configured otherwise).

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Error handling

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Next steps

Endpoint catalogue

All endpoints with request parameters and response shapes

Rate limits & quotas

Response headers, 429 handling and retry guidance

Worked examples

Copy-paste curl examples for common calls