Discussion: Australian Rankings

acejase suggested that I show these ranking lists to a wider audience. For the inter-club competition here, we have to rank all the runners in our club. It's always a subjective nonsense, so now this objective nonsense got created instead.

Shiny. (and very pink)

Out of curiosity, is this querying the OA database live/via a public API, and is said method available to other suitably nerdy people? :)

It's not live, it checks periodically (at least daily) for new results and if there are some, it loads them.

There isn't an API, so the html that your browser usually displays is retrieved and "scraped" (the suitably nerdy term) and the information gotten from there.

The OFA results site does an excellent job of presenting the data in a common format and all the results from a single event are on a single page, which makes for less work.

I made it onto a list :-)

There isn't an API

Gah. I'm sure that was supposed to be a major selling-point of the fancy results system - that we could actually USE it to do cool stuff like this without resorting to scraping pages. :-/

Nice work Undy

Maybe the new new system (Eventor ?) will have it. I know it supports at least some of the IOF XML data exchange lumps.

Of course, the offically sanctioned Australian Elite Ranking Scheme is here:
http://www.orienteering.asn.au/rankings
It is based on the World Ranking Scheme and includes WRE scores for overseas based Aussies like Jules.

The good thing with Undy's is that it includes us mere mortals!

Hey Bruce, I noticed that the rankings don't have the ACt Sprint Champs (not that it helps me)

http://act.orienteering.asn.au/gfolder/results/201...

The good thing with Undy's is that it includes us mere mortals!

The bad thing is that there's a lot of 'mortals' faster than me (including you, Shingo) so my ranking is better on Bruce's list. The official rankings also avoid having to admit that a lot of the women are faster than me too. :)

Thanks Bruce - just to be clear, this is unofficial, and the presence of you, Uncle Jim or anyone else above me in these rankings should not be interpreted as anything but a possible bug.

This uses the same mechanism as the official list and the WRE, just requiring more ranked runners and more events and running over a rolling 12 months.

@lazydave
It looks as though the ACT have stopped posting event results to the national database, only one result since July:
http://results.orienteering.asn.au/index.php?pg=re...

So you guys will join the Taswegians and fall off the pink list.

thanks undy,
another way of generating bragging rights across a wider field

noticed that Newcastle (NCN) has even managed to get a new overseas member, Andre Lalande, from New Caledonia. At least this is better than some interstate result systems that classify all Newcastle runners as NC-noncompetitive and delete them entirely from results & splits :-p

Well the fact that our Metro series results are included makes the list pretty unofficial.

wrt to results on Eventor you can see how they will appear on the Norwegian site. The little blue 'R' icon indicates that the results have been upload and you can click through to see the results sorted by class. You can also filter the results.
Note that I haven't referenced the Australian server because there aren't too many events in their yet. More information to come via "official" channels (and maybe some unofficial) in the near future.
Eventor can accommodate "series" which are an aggregation of events to which points are assigned either on place ie 20pts for 1st, 19pts for 2nd etc or points as a percentage of winning time.
Eventor does have an API. (Use google translate to get an english version until we get the documentation translated).

@lazydave - they would have been included if the results were on OAResults :-) Anyway, thanks. They are there now. http://www.orienteering.asn.au/rankings/2012/12asm...

@undy. If we ever get to a complete national results system with a useable API, I would be looking for someone to help develop a fully automated Rankings module for it. My current approach is only semi automated due to the wide variety of results formats and locations.

I would be looking for someone to help develop a fully automated Rankings module for it

*waves*

If there was some interest in an alternative ranking model based upon paired comparisons and some matrix algebra I would get excited...

I've always thought the BOF ranking system was something OA should aspire to, so well done Undy for starting this off. And we can only hope that Tas and ACT will return to the results system at some stage.

The only thing is that BOF has 4 levels of events (see http://www.britishorienteering.org.uk/images/uploa...) while OA only has 3. The BOF ranking system only includes the first 3 levels, and many events (perhaps even the majority?) in the OA database would be the equivalent of Level D events in the UK.

I'll keep that in mind @Juffy. Have a chat with me about it someday.