active Developer Blog

Today we have officially deprecated the Asset Syndication API and would like developers to use the Search API instead.  The Asset Syndication API was our first public API and was successfully integrated to by many developers and business partners.  We will continue to support those who have already integrated to the Asset Syndication API.  But we will no longer allow developers to sign up for access to it.

The Search API is far more robust and has an entirely new technology set behind it (although it serves the same data).  It has excellent support for metadata-based queries as well as free-form, keyword-based searches.  If you have any questions, please comment on this blog or hit me up on twitter @jgrahamthomas.

One of the Search API users noticed an issue with our Geo Data the other week, and we stopped to investigate what was going on.  As you can see through the Mashup he's developing, http://dave.tycho.ws/ActiveMap/?loc=mi&racetype=running, running events that are supposed to show up in Michigan are actually appearing in Texas.  We had a few issues with our Geocoding service provider last month whereby an interface update they rolled out produced inaccurate results in some cases.  We worked with them to try and resolve the issue, but were unable to reach common ground.  So we ended up switching Geocosing service providers and have seen our accuracy improve significantly.

The unfortunate byproduct of this is some of the events entered into our system last month have bad Geodata, and after analysis the cost to fix those records isn't worth the benefit.  So here's what you can do if you find inconsistencies:

• Include the city/state combination along with your keyword in the search request, ane leave "l=everywhere".  Here's a sample query for running events in San Diego, CA, for example, http://api.amp.active.com/search?k=running+san+diego+california&f=activities&v=xml&l=everywhere&r=50&s=relevance&m=meta%3AstartDate%3Adaterange%3Atoday..&api_key=wuhmn9ye94xn3xnteudxsavw.
• Include only the state in the "l" field, i.e. "l=California".  This does a string match in our system and bypasses the lat/long data that we're having some inconsistencies with.  Here's an example search for running events in California http://api.amp.active.com/search?k=running&f=activities&v=xml&l=California%2C+US&r=50&s=relevance&m=meta%3AstartDate%3Adaterange%3Atoday..&api_key=wuhmn9ye94xn3xnteudxsavw.

We fully expect that over the next 2 months our inaccurate records will reduce significantly as events either occur or are updated by event directors in our system.

Regards,

Jeremy

Yesterday we rolled out an update to the Search API that contains two significant improvements.

Improvement 1

Duplicate data has been removed.  Previously, some records contained multiple occurences of elements such as "assetId" or "eventId".  These elements will now occur only once.

Improvement 2

We are now consistent with the way in which collections are represented.  Previously, a collection with more than one value, such as the "tag" collection, would have been represented as:

<tag>
<value>event:10</value>
<value>Running:10</value>
</tag>

But a collection with one value was represented as:

<tag>Running:10</tag>

We've since updated the API to be consistent, so that collections with one value have the same format as those with multiple values.  So now, for example, the "tag" collection with one value appears as:

<tag>
<value>Running:10</value>
</tag>

We've been working to deprecate the Asset Syndication API in favor of the more robust, scalable Search API.  Included in this effort is changing the contract behind the Asset Syndication Widget.  We'll be making changes today and tomorrow.  Look for updated documentation soon.

JT

cross-posted from the Active.com Product Developer blog

I'm happy to announce that I'll be speaking at the Business of APIs Conference in New York City on Monday, 16 November, 2009. We've been steadily investing in our public API over the past few months with the Search API being the most recent addition to our portfolio. I'm going to be telling the "Active Story", starting from the origins of our company and how we grew through acquisitions. The prime directive of active.com was to become the world's most comprehensive directory for things to do, and in order to accomplish this we needed to ingest data produced by the products we'd acquired in order to make them discoverable on the site. An internal initiative, then, drove us to consider interoperable APIs as a means to facilitate integration between systems we owned, and at that APIs that could be accessed across data centers. As a by product of this initiative we found that external developers were interested in our data, hence the birth of developer.active.com.

Anyway, it's an interesting story, and if you're NYC and want to hear the details, sign up for the Business of APIs Conference and come on down to Sunwest Studios.

(cross-posted from the Product Development Blog)

I'm happy to announce that we've opened the API that powers http://searchbeta.active.com, the solution scheduled to become the new Search engine behind active.com in the coming months. By opening the API we're hoping developers will think of interesting ways to use and mashup our data. The API provides programmatic access into our core directory of assets, including:

• Events
• Classes
• Tournaments
• Training Plans
• Race Results
• Articles

While this data was already available before through the Asset Syndication API, it is now possible to conduct relevancy-based searches based on keywords. Plus, the new Search API is fast and allows for a variety of output formats including:

• XML
• HTML
• RSS
• JSON

The Search API is documented at http://developer.active.com/docs#search. Signup for access on developer.active.com, we'll approve your application and get you going. And let us know what you think of the API, either by commenting on this blog, in our API forum, or by sending a tweet to @jgrahamthomas.

(cross-posted from the Active.com Product Development Blog)

Sportspower is a leading highschool team sports ranking website. It contains a complicated algorithm that factors in things like win/loss record, homefield advantage, state division and school size to calculate team rankings at the divisional and national levels. Take a look at the national ranking for "mega" highschool football teams on Sportspowerhttp://www.sportspower.com/football/teams/high-school/football/texas/cedar-hill-longhorns/2034/ratings/mega/spc.

Rankings data is available through an open API, and we partnered early on with ESPN Rise to feature football rankings on their site. Check out the bottom right-hand corner of http://espn.go.com/high-school-sports/rise/football/ where they build a widget consuming the Rankings API. The API is now available for all developers to leverage in their applications or websites.

Read up on the Sportspower API on developer.active.com. Typically, the API is used to:

1. Determine the geographic context for ranking data by querying the Playoff Group, Playoff Subgroups or Sportspower School Size Classification API for the relevant group ID (i.e. "60" for all very large highschools in the United States).
2. Use the geographic context (group ID) to get a list of rankings for a given sport.

During the initial rollout, only highschool football (api.sportspower.com/football/) and basketball (api.sportspower.com/basketball/) is supported with lacrosse data from laxpower.com soon to follow.

(cross-posted from community.active.com)

Livestrong.com and ESPN Rise are new additions to a growing list of websites featuring active.com data through integration to the active.com API. As Geoff Skow writes on developer.active.com:

Demand Media's LIVESTRONG.com, a “practical resource to find a wealth of health-related information from a wide range of sources”, taps into the Active.com directory of community events to add to the relevance and usefulness of its business listings. For example, the site includes an Active-powered list of nearby events to each of the pages in its Restaurant section:

ESPN Rise uses the SportsPower API Service to better fulfill its goal of offering “all the latest high school sports information, including scores, stats, rankings, polls and athlete profiles”. The site features the top ranked high school football teams across five classifications according to the Active Power Ratings. New ratings and rankings are unveiled every week throughout the season, and are generated at the national, state and local level.

We're excited about the uptake of our API and hope to see developers do new and innovative things with our data. You can read more about our API on programmableweb.com at http://www.programmableweb.com/api/active or read through the api specification at http://developer.active.com/docs.

Many of you who have tried to create an account on developer.active.com last week would have seen an error like the one to the right where your email address was reported as not matching.  This was a bug introduced in a patch and was rectified this morning.  Apologies for the headache there.