UKC

Hi,

I want to know why there is no public routes API, I found a post indicating an api exists however it is not public.
(https://www.ukclimbing.com/forums/t.php?t=644027).

I want to track my logbook and wishlist entries from my phone; current offerings on the android market are quite limited and I would be interested in designing a tracking application.

Is the api still closed? Will it ever be open to the public?

In reply to babbleshack:

I think it makes more commercial sense for it to be closed. The logbooks are generally the best thing about this site, so the data is valuable. Using that data to get you to use the rockfax app (when released) seams entirely sensible to me.

In reply to babbleshack:

Hi Babbleshack,

Yes there is an API, but it is closed. The API was primarily created to serve data to the Rockfax app. The iOS version is currently available and does everything you talk about here. The Android version is also currently in development and will have all the functionality of the iOS version.

There are no plans to make the API publicly available.

In reply to Martin McKenna - Rockfax:

Okay then, seems a shame! There is lots of good data, and am sure there are also plenty of devs on here!

Ill keep searching for a crag API then :p.

Thanks for the reply!

In reply to babbleshack:


I think it's a lot to ask, both in terms of the development and maintenance effort and the infrastructure required to cope with a potentially limitless number of requests. Then of course there's the IP angle.

If you really need something you can cook up a fairly good solution using Python and Beautiful Soup (other frameworks are available), which is what I've done for my data visualization demos.

In reply to planetmarshall:

Just speculating, but I'd think it's almost entirely an IP thing. Presumably the fundamentals of the private API are pretty stable, and Im guessing there's already some auth/rate limit infrastructure in place to stop individuals abusing the private api so in theory opening it up to the public wouldn't be that much work.

The data itself is very valuable though (especially considering there's a big chunk of rockfax data in there as well). There's gotta be thousands of man hours that have gone in to collecting and collating it all.

In reply to remus:

Yes, but most of the man hours have been freely given by UKC members, from which UKC derives commercial advantage. That they don't provide (for example) a simple web-based restful API is a bit of a cheek IMHO - especially so if you have spent lots of hours and dosh providing your own (non commercial) guide to a climbing area (at your own cost), to find that someone has verbatim lifted your work and dumped in the log-books without bothering to ask you first. Not that I'm bitter....

In reply to Scotch Bingington:


If someones stolen your work tell UKC and get them to remove it.

I don't think the lack of an api is at all cheeky. They already provide the logbooks for free and it gets plenty of use,. if users want to add data to it to improve the service that's up to them.