.. _background: Background =========== OSO Services provides the back end functionality for the Proposal Handling Tool and the Observation Design Tool. The reasoning behind a single service is that a lot of functionality will be shared - for example validating astronomical input or looking up information from astronomy data sources. Sharing a single repository also means less maintenance overhead and more opportunity for collaboration between the OSO teams. The application offers a RESTful API split by `/common`, `/pht` and `/odt` paths. For more information on the OSO workflow and how this application fits in the architecture, see `Solution Intent `_