National Park Search

Humanity was destined to explore nature! Chat with the National Park Search to find information about the parks that are best for you based on your interests, preferences, and what you want to see!

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Inspiration

My partner and I were both in the Boy Scouts program together, and achieved the rank of Eagle. Our hearts have always belonged to hiking, camping, and other activities which inspired us to build a project that would allow us to share our experience of nature with the world!

What it does

Our project takes in a user's prompt (a simple description of their likes, dislikes, and any information they would like to find out more about) and parses their input for keywords that are relevant to the National Park System. Using the NPS API and our own search and interpretation algorithms, we find those and related keywords in parks and rank them based on their odds of aligning with user likeness. The search then returns information about those parks.

How we built it

We used the National Park Service API, which returns basic information such as a description and location of each park, to decide what to display to the user. We also incorporated the GroupDocs document search API to search for synonyms to the keywords, which allows us to display parks that involve similar activities and attractions, not just the exact same keywords.

Challenges we ran into

The biggest challenges came down to displaying all the information on the Front end and also trying to organize our information in a way that is accessible. Storing this much information is harsh as it requires several data structures for each subclass and purpose.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

To both of us, this project was a massive step up and ambitious - we are proud to have completed as much as we did, coming to a working prototype and being able to submit it!

What we learned

We learned how to interact with the NPS API and similar necessary APIs - we both also gained experience working with front-end applications in Java, as well as new debugging and problem-solving techniques.

What's next for National Park Search

This project can go into many spaces - we could expand the total range of parks that we take a look at, we can provide more information on each park, we can smooth out each of our features to provide quicker and cleaner results, we could continue to develop the front-end for a better user experience, and we can also focus on optimizing our code to work at the best efficiency.

Built With

  • groupdocsapi
  • java
  • javax
  • nationalparkserviceapi
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