# The basics The TOAR database offers a REST service to retrieve its data and metadata. A REST API is a web service, where you can format the URL with question marks and ampersands and issue commands to a web page. These will then be processed and the result returned to you. [https://toar-data.fz-juelich.de/api/v2/](https://toar-data.fz-juelich.de/api/v2/) provides a description of the available REST services. There are four core endpoints: - stationmeta (describing the station), - timeseries (describing the time series) - variables (describing the variables), and - data (describing the data).