The Social Service is a RESTful application which exposes operations coming from both the gCube `Social-Networking-Library <https://wiki.gcube-system.org/gcube/Social_Networking_Library>`_
and the `User Management <https://wiki.gcube-system.org/gcube/UserManagement_Core>`_ components.
The former is the bridge between the Cassandra Cluster (on which social data are stored) and the social applications,
whereas the latter is the abstraction layer over the enabling technology for the Identity and Access Management service, in terms of: roles, users and
organizations and how they are mapped to D4Science concepts.
The web services exposes a subset of such functionalities over **https in a standard, reliable and secure way**.
Specifically, the implementation fully adopts `OIDC (OpenID Connect) <https://openid.net/connect>`_ for authentication and UMA 2 (User Managed Authorization) for authorization flows.
The methods of the Web Service can be called by writing your own REST client application or by using already existing REST client plugins. We provide the following Java Client out-of-the-box.
The service exposes `its methods <../api-docs/index.html>`_ using a standard naming approach. Moreover, they accept (in case of http POST/PUT methods) JSON objects.