During the seminar it was clear that there were two different
independent tasks:
At the end two groups were formed that should take care of the two
tasks mentioned above. The groups were:
Finally a mailing list was set up for public discussion of the
issues. This way interested parties who did not participate in the
Oslo seminar could work with the groups.
Some discussion on the mailing list regarding the use of XML as the
syntax for the standard had also taken place. Especially Ian Watson,
GBR, made some experiments, gave an introduction to XML and made a first draft
of an XML based standard. There was a broad agreement in the expert
group on the use of XML as the syntax but there was some differences
in how fine grained the XML should be. Could it be used as a "wrapper"
for tabular data? Or should everything down to the last second be a
single XML entity?
Sadly the discussion of the message formats didn't get far. All
efforts went into the modelling (the Attribute List) and the syntax
(XML).
The model was made public in July, 2000, with a request for
comments. Now the final model has been made into a beta version of the
official IOF Data Standard. This does not mean that all the work has
been done. There is still ample room for improvements but now it is
time to get hands-on experience, i.e. to let the software developers
work with the standard and learn from their experience.
As a result of this project's initiation the IT Commission asked the
World Cup organizers and software developers for their cooperation and
at this point nearly all have agreed to participate. This means that
the leading software developers have committed themselves to the IOF
Interface Standard.
During the year since the version 1.0 (beta) was made public
especially the OLA Project and Condes used XML to exchange information
between software parts. The experiences with this and the need for
speed due to the tight schedule for the World Cup Results Project lead
to the definition of version 2.0 during the winter 2001/2002.
Kick-Off Seminar, Oslo, October 1998
In October 1998 the IOF Technical Development Committee invited to a
Kick-Off Seminar in Oslo regarding the definition of a set of "open,
standard interfaces between various, disparate computer components
used at orienteering events". Around 10 persons representing Emit,
n3sport, SportIdent and other orienteering software developers from 5
countries participated in the week-end seminar.
At the seminar most of the time was spent discussing the first task
and a draft attribute list emerged identifying a lot of the
information that models an orienteering event.
Work Group Message and Attribute
Work Group Syntax
Futhermore Stefan Nordmark, SWE, was appointed project manager. The
project itself was owned by the IOF TDC who in the end should sanction
the standard.
1999
As everywhere in the IT business everyone is busy. This was also true
for the participants in the working groups. Sadly this meant that the
workplan for the two groups didn't hold. At the end of 1999 not much
work was in fact done. There had been some work done on the Attribute
List.OLA
At the end of 1999 and beginning of 2000 Ted de St. Croix, CAN, took
up the XML standard. Working on a new Swedish event adminstration
system, OLA, he saw the idea in using XML as the underlying modelling.
With a lot of input from Finn Arildsen, Kell Sønnichsen, Peter Löfås,
Olav Nedrelid, Pekka Pirilä, and Hans Steinegger a fine grained XML
model of an orienteering event emerged during the spring of 2000.
World Cup 2002 Result Project
This project was started in the summer 2001 with the task of
making a solution for web casting the results from the World Cup
events in 2002 through a common web site. For this to succeed it was
paramount to have a common exchange format that the different
organizers - and their software - could use to send results to the
common web server.
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