2025Backend API and museum platform

Museum Digitalization Platform Backend

Technologies

Express (Node.js)MongoDBRESTful API

Features

Detailed technical documentation for the frontend team

Overview

Backend development for a digitalization platform built for a paleontological museum, designed to manage interactive content, exhibition devices, and application flows used along the museum journey. The system exposes RESTful APIs for museums, digital objects, exhibitions, quizzes, and narrative content, supporting both frontend applications and on-site devices. The architecture was designed to ensure data consistency, API security, and activity tracking.

Role

Technical contribution to backend platform development, with ownership on RESTful APIs, MongoDB modeling, authentication/security, model relationships, and technical collaboration with the frontend team.

What I did

Implemented RESTful APIs to manage museums, digital objects, exhibitions, games, quizzes, and narrative content. Built CRUD endpoints with pagination, dynamic filtering, and automatic relationship population. Designed and refined MongoDB schemas with bidirectional relationships across related entities. Implemented JWT authentication, session handling, password reset with temporary tokens, and admin routes. Added structured logging (info/warning/error) and analytics APIs for app and device-generated events. Collaborated with the frontend team through detailed API documentation.

Problems solved

Data relationship consistency

The platform manages many relationships across entities (museums, digital objects, exhibitions, devices). I implemented automatic synchronization logic across related models to prevent data inconsistencies.

API security

APIs needed to support both public and curator-protected routes. I implemented JWT-based authentication with authorization handling and resource-level access control.

Activity tracking

To monitor usage and system behavior, I introduced a logging and analytics layer able to register events generated by users and museum devices.