My dear wife and I like to travel and explore nature. Naturally, US national parks are always high on our list. For years, I wanted to put together a list of all the national parks in the US. Do you know how many national parks and national monuments the US has? 472! I did not know that until recently. What I did know, however, was that the National Park data was freely available. The US has this thing that most things done with taxpayer dollars should belong to the people, i.e., freely available. That’s why you can find and access literally hundreds of thousands of data sets on data.gov and also US National Park information on https://irma.nps.gov/DataStore/.
My sample data repository at https://github.com/gvenzl/sample-data now contains information about all 472 national parks, including what activities can be done, contact details, and images taken in the parks. You can find all of this in the national-parks folder. The data is available in a rather large install.sql.gz file that first needs to be uncompressed or can be loaded from csv files.
Oracle Database users, be warned that the data set requires 32k VARCHAR2 support and that the install script leverages the (for Oracle Database new) Table Value Constructor (an INSERT INTO statement with multiple values in the VALUES clause). If you are using 19c, you can instead import the data from the csv files with, e.g., the SQLcl LOAD command.
The highlights of the data set:
- 472 United States national parks and monuments
- 40 activities
- 4 contact types
- 1,142 contacts
- 4,029 park-activity mappings
- 172,506 images