Open Reference Database
1 Introduction
We aim to provide an open, crowdsourced reference database to help different systems talk across the sport.
We’re giving unique IDs to the key things in the sport - Organisations, Venues, Competitions and People. We already have over 6000 clubs, 5000 tracks, 2400 competitions and 34,000 people. Everyone will be able to share our IDs.
We’re working on the mechanisms to let people claim their club, delegate responsibility to local volunteers and exports, review changes and keep the data quality high.
2 Common Data
Clubs and Organisations
We’re building up a database of clubs, federations and other organisations. If it might compete or organise a race, it belongs in our database. Each club can have a unique code within its country, and make lists available to every federation and competition organiser, and provide practical assets like club flags. So you can accurately take entries from athletes in your own and other countries, and exchange data easily in spreadsheets and in more advanced formats.
Venues - Tracks and Road/XC Courses
Our database contains hundreds of verified athletics tracks already. Feel free to check near you and tell us about any track we have missed.
We plan to add common competition courses on road and cross country, club headquarters and other venues within the sport. This makes it far easier to organise an event, with ready-made map links and venue information to re-use.
Competitions
A global, free competition directory. Anyone will be able to list things and reserve an ID. So when uploading results, we’ll know which
People
Half the admin work in the sport is about accurately identifying people. Working with GDPR, we’ve developed a process to give IDs to athletes and sdtore. This
Athletics Data
3 What next?
The essential non-personal reference data will be free to use. We hope to
If you’re a national federation and willing to share data and get it into a useful form, we can give you access to manage the data in your country. We may ask for a contribution to the system costs. We’re looking for sponsors.