Big Foot beats IOF by a week

The IOF's IT group announced its new data interchange standard yesterday, a week after Big Foot ran an event utilising the standard for all data interchange. Not that we were particularly fast - the credit goes to orienteering software authors who have been using the draft standard for some time.

The standard specifies the format that data should be shared between pieces of orienteering software (entry system, SportIdent system, results publication). If all the pieces conform to the same system, the orienteering admin should be easier. How did this work in practice ?

The DuO used Eventor for entries, startlist publication and (some) results publication and MeOS for SportIdent processing. Both systems use the new data standard and MeOS can talk directly to Eventor. (Eventor developer Mats Troeng did most of the heavy lifting on the new standard). Utilising that comes down to a whole load of click on this:

      Create an event  

	Updating the runner database will update the database of known orienteers from the data held in Eventor.
	Check the start method and first start time are right (there was a small time zone conversion issue)
	Sometimes it takes a while, but here comes the data.
	You beauty - we have all the data.
This seems to be the stage where we sometimes saw timeouts. The workaround is to export the files from MeOS and load them into Eventor (extra clickery-pokery).	Allocate start times and publish them to Eventor, publish results to Eventor. Easy.
The open-source MeOs software is available for free from here. A lightly Australianised one is available from here.