National Park Service

Vision

The National Park Service will communicate NPS alerts, events, and news as well as additional authoritative information about parks, campgrounds, and visitor centers via AI Personal Assistants in order to better serve our visitors.

Sample questions that digital assistants could answer using existing data include:

• What National Park Service sites are in [state]?
• Are there any active alerts at [park]?
• What events are happening today at [park]?
• Are there campgrounds at [park]?
• Does [campground] accept 40' long RVs?
• What are the hours for [visitor center] at [park]?

Resources

The NPS has an API and documentation live and accessible at https://developer.nps.gov/api/index.htm.

API resources include:

• Alerts - Alerts communicate information about hazardous, potentially hazardous, or changing conditions that may affect a visit to a national park. Alert data includes the type of alert, title, description, and optional link to additional information.
• Campgrounds - Campground data includes location, contact, operating hours, site amenities, fee, and accessibility information for campgrounds in national parks. At least one representative photo of each campground is available Some parks have multiple campgrounds of a variety of types (eg, developed or primitive); others have none.
• Events - Event data includes information about the date, time, fee, and description of events taking place in national parks.
• News Releases - News release data includes a title, abstract, and link to national park news releases, as well as an optional image.
• Parks - Park basics data includes location, contact, operating hours, and entrance fee/pass information for each national park. At least five photos of each park are also available.
• Visitor Centers - Visitor center data includes location, contact, and operating hours information for visitor centers and other visitor contact facilities in national parks At least one visitor center is listed for each park; some parks with multiple visitor centers may include information about more than one.

Platforms

The National Park Service is sincerely interested in making its data available through all of the platforms currently a part of this pilot project (including but not limited to Amazon Alexa, Facebook Messenger, Google Assistant, and Microsoft Cortana). For this reason, the possibility of a middleware solution that might act as an abstraction layer between our data and these services is most interesting. Should resources limit what is possible to accomplish through the pilot project, we would only limit our scope after consulting with all platform representatives.

Team

• Ken Handwerger (ken_handwerger@nps.gov)
• Matt Poyner (matt_poyner@nps.gov)
• Mike Tangorre (michael_tangorre@contractor.nps.gov)
• Todd M. Edgar (todd_edgar@nps.gov)
• Trevor Cole (trevor_cole@nps.gov)