UKH

I don't know if this is something that has come up before, but is there any chance that data from UKC could be used for research? I don't have anything specific in mind, but I was wondering if there was an API or something to access the overall (publicly visible) stats of every climber on the website.

I don't think there is such an API available (that's publically accessible anyway), but if you had a particular idea in mind it'd be worth dropping Alan and co. an email, they've helped out with some similar requests in the past.

Worth baring in mind that what you are basically asking is for UKC to give access to an expansive and valuable data set for free. While UKC doesn't have the same kind of big data as Facebook or Google or whatever, it all still falls into the same basket of valuable commodities that a company collects and can monetise. I would expect that you'd need to be willing to pay for access to that data unless there is some other good justification, like the research being wholly altruistic in nature.

Obviously I don't work for UKC so I've no idea what they would say, just pointing out that data has value and UKC is a private company that operates for profit (though obviously not purely profit driven and maybe not even primarily profit driven).

They've shared it in the past, for example: https://www.ukclimbing.com/articles/features/neural_network_trained_on_ukc_...

Edit: I expect you'd be better off requesting it for a specific aim rather than exploratory analysis, and also agreeing to share the results back with UKC.

With regards to monetisation, maybe it's my lack of imagination, but I have a hard time thinking of why someone would pay for logbook data. Also, there's nothing in the current privacy policy that makes reference to the logbook data (expect a passing note wrt. account retention) and it's not completely clear which of the defined data categories it would fall into (profile/interests?)