For several years now Historic England have been preparing a successor to the old Heritage Gateway what was launched in 2007. Innovative in its day, performing real time searches against nearly 100 local, regional and national databases, it had not been adequately maintained and upgraded in line with a changing technical landscape, and had suffered from inadequate adherence to its data and protocol standards.

A new Heritage Gateway is needed! 

Exegesis (now part of Idox Geospatial) have been involved in all stages of the planning and design of a new architecture, this time based around harvesting datasets into a central repository against which all querying and presentation would be undertaken.

To make this simple for contributing Historic Environment Records (HERs), we've created and launched the new HBSMR Gateway 2.0 API, which allows Historic England to harvest the HER data easily and quickly every few hours/days. The new API is fully configurable to control which records and attributes are published.

The new API is already working successfully for ten early-adopting HERs, and will be rolled out to others through 2025.

Further information from Crispin Flower