Mountain Project API

Is there, or are there any plans for a mountain project API. I am in the planning stages for developing/updating a website for the Iowa Climbers Coalition and thought that leveraging the information from moutainproject.com would be beneficial for both communities.

My ideas would include:
- Mapping users to mountain project users to sync profile data like ticks, photos etc.
- Ability to create areas, walls and routes from a remote website
- Ability to contribute to photos from a remote website
- Ability to pull in areas, walls and routes to a remote website

The exposure of an API could promote and build a more comprehensive data set for mountain project and provide a useful tool for developers to leverage data from mountain project.

I would be interested in hearing your ideas and thoughts.

Thanks,
Adam Delaney

Bump! This interests me as well.

interested as well. This thread popped up in the query to see if it already existed. Are any of you other guys able to help make it?

Has there been any response to this question? I agree there are so many ways mountain project information could be leveraged. If this isn't already in the making it needs to be! I am more than willing to volunteer hours to make this a reality.

Wouldn't "leveraging" the database through another site/app be devaluing the one thing that makes MP what it is?

Bump. For a site that exists because of the community contributions, it's a bit strange that data is not available to the community :/

Forrest Fowler wrote:Bump. For a site that exists because of the community contributions, it's a bit strange that data is not available to the community :/

Well, it is also a site that has to generate revenue, or it won't exist. APIs would encourage people to use MP content, but skips the ad revenue that drives it. While an API to contribute would probably not be a bad idea, APIs to crawl content are probably not going to fly. Besides, a skilled and motivated web developer could probably develop something independently without too much difficulty.

shoo wrote: Well, it is also a site that has to generate revenue, or it won't exist. APIs would encourage people to use MP content, but skips the ad revenue that drives it. While an API to contribute would probably not be a bad idea, APIs to crawl content are probably not going to fly. Besides, a skilled and motivated web developer could probably develop something independently without too much difficulty.

Yes, it would be easy to scrape the content and use it in an unsanctioned way. People here seem to be asking for a reliable, approved way to use and interact with the data instead. I would assume until proven otherwise that they have ideas for using an API that would actually grow and strengthen the community rather than suck away ad revenue. The OP seems to be thinking mostly along those lines.

Well, to try to get some attention to this thread, I was wondering if anything had changed since the last post? Does anyone know if something is in the pipeline?

A big +1 on this! I'm trying to teach myself data analysis and having a tough time coming up with projects, but I can think of all kinds of studies and data vis projects if I had access to an API, even with just some basic data.

Thinking more about it, you could control access via API tokens, which would only be provided after some agreement to say you won't use the data for your own profit, or something along those lines. Just a thought.

Will, I completely agree. A token access with a max API calls per day and per hour would certainly help to eliminate most of the risk of someone else profiting off of it. It would really only add value to the community, as well.

Just found another thread with all of these visualizations from Michael Skaug. Great work! I'm going to send him an email and see what his process was for obtaining his source data from Mountain Project and let everyone here know if I get a response.

Hello everyone!

TLDR; I started an open source project called the OpenBeta Initiative, to build a new collaboration app for climbers. Website: openbeta.io

now the long version:

I have been very interested in an Open Source version of MP since I work in open source software development and am also a climber. I envision us having an open-license climbing database that we all can freely access and build other cool things on top similar to the OpenStreetMap project.

As a fellow software dev I have tremendous respect for Nick and the work he put in over the years. Philosophically I feel like there's still room for another project with a focus on mapping and with an open source license for code and data where everyone can contribute code, betas and are free to use it however they see fit. You just *have* to make your derived work open source as well.

So I started the OpenBeta Initiative (link: openbeta.io ) and have been working on a prototype since December of 2016. At the moment the app (link: openbeta.io/demo ) is relatively simple - you can add new climbing routes and save them to the database. You can also define climbing 'areas' as well but won't be able to save them yet (the next update should fix that). The REST api (link: api.openbeta.io/ ) is not well-documented at the moment but it lets you send queries like "give me all the routes within x-miles radius of [lat,long]".

I really appreciate your feedbacks, collaboration ideas and Github Pull-Requests!

Viet Nguyen