Enquiry

Greetings public-hydra,
I would like to run a little technical problem by you, to see what you
think.
I'm conducting some research for the Global Ecovillage Network, which has a
rich database it would like to publish via a rest interface, for other
networks to make use of.
I expect its not too difficult to build a db and expose lots of content
types and fields with some kind of security wrapper. But at the moment all
the data is defined and managed in Drupal.
The Drupal Services module exposes content using Drupal's complex internal
data structures which are not intuitive to external applications.
So we need to define and publish and implement a rest API just for this
data set. I was wondering if there was an easier way.
What I would ideally like is a standard way for 3rd party application to
query my data structure, to find out what content types and fields are
available, and from that information to generate its own content displays,
its own content editing form, so that the data held on a central server can
be managed by many apps, not just Drupal.
I don't want to have to change the code every time somebody changes the
data structure.
Seems such a generic requirement. Is it possible the code exists to this,
server-side and even app side?
Thanks for your knowledge.
Matthew

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