World and European Athletics are keen to explore the possibilities to award a label for vendors who submit their results in a comlpliant format, in timely manner.
The vendors would have to deliver the results in the approved format, before the competition for entries, and after the competition for results.
The format of this discussion will be a workshop, to exchange ideas.
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To facilitate this, I’d be very happy to document the process of implementing the existing APIs for sending competitions and results, which we at OpenTrack went through last year.
We discussed holding monthly online workshops - perhaps this could be a good topic for one in June or July?
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Api (to meet data operator system) is also (a long desired) wish for other “users/suppliers” to get live results information details, (like time-of-day for each performance etc). Example; i now record short videos of each field-attempt, but need to link it to an athlete and his/her individual attempt.
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Hi Eddy,
At OpenTrack we make sure users can integrate and be notified in various ways - our own TV console is a web page which can receive timetables and notifications (latest throw, latest results up, start list / results for event X, latest scores). We have a few streaming companies who like to do their own graphics who have connected up to this. We’d be happy to share and standardise these protocols but it really needs at least one other “player” to do the same concurrently…
My other wish on these lines would be for the various statistical services to have a common query interface - so if we can’t find an athlete’s history in the WA database, we could query their home-country one.
This was our original vision in 2016/2017 and we have not made much progress on it, I fear.
- Andy
I’m from the company that maintains the site & stats system of Latvian Athletics Association. Personally I very much support having standardised protocols for both data and querying.
Our own APIs are not something I’m proud of as they were created ad hoc and the features were added whenever a need arised. The units are mixed, the keys are cryptic and so on. But we’ve had no incentive and no budget to rework that. When we had to do some integration with local competitions, we used the opportunity to partly implement the open athletics JSON-LD format. But once again there is no justification to develop that further with no applications for it.
The vendors would have to deliver the results in the approved format, before the competition for entries, and after the competition for results.
I suspect that a gentle push to national federations by Nicolas with WA and/or EA backing might provide the justification to allot some budget for such tasks.
My other wish on these lines would be for the various statistical services to have a common query interface - so if we can’t find an athlete’s history in the WA database, we could query their home-country one.
As long as the protocol is not too crazy, we’d be on board with this as well. We already have something similar so it wouldn’t be too hard to provide an API if it’s standardised and useful for any other player!
https://athletics.lv/en/stats?athlete=21824&format=json&fields=discipline,date
Btw in that in addition to the obvious “get results of athlete X” and “get results of a competition”, it might also be useful to query some more “business intelligence”. We do a lot of various “toplist” querying as well as checking if an athlete meets qualification criteria.
E.g. here’s how we query the best male 110 mh athletes of 2025, limiting scope to 106.7 cm hurdles, electronic timing and wind below 2 m/s: https://athletics.lv/lv/stats?discipline=30;em:1;w:2;hoh:106.7&venue-type=indoor,outdoor,road&gender=m&date-from=2025-01-01&date-to=2025-12-31&country=LVA&limit=50&athlete-limit=1&format=table&fields=athlete,result,date_of_birth,iaaf_points,classification,wind,current_coach,event,event_place,date&category=ow,df,gw,gl,a,b,c,d,e,f,other&format=json
I don’t think this needs to be a required part for the data compliance badge as it might scare off those who would be only willing to proide rawer data dumps. But it would be nice to have a common format for all those who are willing to provide it.
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