Walks Finder/Breathing Places Integration

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Walks Finder/Breathing Places Integration

Lime Thinking created a data transfer between the Ramblers' Walks Finder and the BBC's Breathing Places project.

The Ramblers' Walks Finder is legacy application which allows Ramblers' groups to upload details of the group led walks to be searched online. Breathing Places was a BBC initiative to allow users to search for outdoor activities/locations.

It was felt that the large number of Ramblers' walks being added to the BBC site would be beneficial to the Breathing Places users. Adding thousands of walks via the web form interface would have been very time consuming, fortunately the BBC also provided a mechanism for adding data via an XML feed. Lime Thinking's challenge was to get the data from the Walks Finder into the format required for Breathing Places. The BBC's XML format had not been written with walks in mind and the Walks Finder pre-dated the BBC's project by some time.

We achieved the data transfer successfully added a large number of walks to the breathing spaces projects. In order to do so we had to deal with:

Transforming location data from grid reference and Easting, Northing to longitude and latitude.
Converting walks to both places and events, as required by Breathing Places.
Collating the places to avoid overloading Breathing Places with a huge number of them.
Dealing with the differing sets of county names used by each application.

This type of data integration is not available in off-the-shelf packages and required Lime Thinking's expertise in building bespoke applications. In this case neither system was created by Lime Thinking but we were able to engineer a solution to transferring the data between them.