ACTIVE Network API Developer Blog

ACTIVE Network is proud to announce the upcoming launch of the new Activity Search API v2. We’ve been busy preparing the new ACTIVE Access developer portal with updated documentation, interactive I/O docs, a forum for developers to ask questions, identify bugs, and make API requests.

The launch of this new Activity Search API v2 will unlock loads of data and flexibility for app developers. The Activity Search API v2 gives developers easy access to ACTIVE’s broad array of activity data. The Activity Search API v2 processes simple HTTP GET requests and returns results in JSON.  The API supports keyword search against ACTIVE assets, result restriction to a particular location, and result filtering based on asset metadata. All activity registrations are completed online at ACTIVE.com. The reason this is so exciting is because we’ve also been working tirelessly to standardize our events and activities data across the company.

What Does That Mean To You?

We take event and activity data of any quality and completeness and utilize machine learning algorithms and text mining techniques to assess, clean, classify, and vastly improve the quality of the data to a form suitable for feeding into the comprehensive list of world-wide events and activities offered through Active.com.  The system also ensures proper naming, categorizing, and search optimization of each event, while breaking the data down into independent sub-components, each of which can be enhanced and accessed separately. Subsequent re-submissions of these events are detected upon ingestion, de-duplicated, and smartly re-assigned the prior final changes depending on what data is new for even faster time-to-live improved data on update. No longer will you need to remove duplicate events or create special “workarounds” to pull the correct data. Basically, there will be even more events in the database and you can find the events that you are looking for more easily via the Activity Search API v2.

Enhancements Galore

To summarize, these are the new enhancements coming to the Activity Search API v2:

• Additional Events Available – All new events submitted to our database will be available through the Activity Search API v2. The existing Activity API (v1) will slowly receive fewer updates and less event volume. If you’re just starting to build your app, then make sure you’re building with the Activity Search API v2.
• REST Service – Supports JSON results returned by the API.
• Expanded Data Set – Eliminates need for the Activity Details API making for a simpler integration.
• Extra Classifications and tags – assets allow for more refined search capability using new parameters.
• Combined schema – services all activity types (e.g. Camps, Classes, Races, Events)
• Standardized Attributes – Distance, Age Group, etc.
• Independent Asset Types – Place and Organization entities can be referenced independently of other Asset types (e.g. search by Place/Venue, Organizer)
• Improved geo-location – Much improved latitude/longitude values to aid in location-based searches.

Still Reading? Start Hacking!

With any API, we’d like to prevent abuse, allocate and scale resources more efficiently, and potentially offer custom endpoints of the Activity Search API v2 in the future. We therefore highly encourage you to register as soon as possible to create your developer account and start using API keys. Registration is free. Here is a quick start guide to the developer portal and to help you build your application using a Activity Search API v2 key:

Register — http://developer.active.com/member/register

Documentation — http://developer.active.com/docs/read/v2_Activity_API_Search

Interactive IO Docs — http://developer.active.com/io-docs

Developer Forum — http://developer.active.com/forum

We value our developer community and have thought about this API launch carefully. If you have any feedback, please comment it in the forum and we’ll keep the discussion going there.