Nebula API

The Nebula API is a public API for accessing university-related data, consisting of endpoints to access archived data in addition to live, up-to-date data.

Motivation

In short, without Nebula API, no programmatic way of accessing university-related data. Some students at UT Dallas have made innnovative tools like Discord bots to view dining services times or to see parking availability on campus, but these involve implementing boilerplate just to get the data they need.

The Nebula API is meant to be a public data layer for cool projects and is meant to encourage students to build cool personal projects that work for them using data that's easily accessible.

History

The Nebula API originally began in summer 2020 as the Comet Data Service, an admin dashboard to store and aggregate course information for the Nebula Planner (which was called Comet Planning at the time). Sunny Guan and Saloni Shivdasani contributed during this time.

At HackUTD VIII in fall 2021, hackers tested and built projects with the Nebula API as part of a alpha preview. As a result, the Comet Circle team was invited to Project Nebula to work on similar useful tools. Comet Circle was redeployed to heatmap.utdnebula.com for public use.

Contributing

We're always looking for people to help build features and maintain Project Nebula's apps. See our project on GitHub to get involved!

If you have other questions, contact us at core-maintainers@utdnebula.com!