Hi Patrick,
We seperate somatic data from germline, so the query should be:
curl -H 'Content-type:text/xml' 'http://rest.ensembl.org/overlap/id/ENSG00000141510?feature=somatic_variation'
<data id="COSM5493517" assembly_name="GRCh38" consequence_type="splice_region_variant" end="7662020" feature_type="somatic_variation" seq_region_name="17" source="COSMIC" start="766201
9" strand="1">
<alleles>COSMIC_MUTATION</alleles>
</data>
<data id="COSM18654" assembly_name="GRCh38" consequence_type="transcript_ablation" end="7676594" feature_type="somatic_variation" seq_region_name="17" source="COSMIC" start="7669609" s="" trand="1">
See: http://rest.ensembl.org/documentation/info/overlap_id for the list of feature types.
For the optional question: the genomic locations of variants are stored in our database, and are not linked to objects per se. The variant consequence(s)/effect(s) on gene(s) is inferred from the variant location in relation to the gene model.
Best wishes
Ben
Ensembl Helpdesk