How Organizations Can Access Valid ORR-EZ Rating Data For Their Racers.

Regatta Management Solutions (RMS), the front end web supplier for Offshore Racing Associations ORR-ez racing rule, has a variety of technical solutions for accessing the rating data for rated boats. They vary in complexity and level of development effort on the part of the OA who desires to access the data.  The ORR-ez Rule dramatically increases the number of ratings per boat based on wind speed and course type, a key feature for improving rating accuracy.  The volume of rating data points makes data exchange methods even more important.

• Online Valid List: Using the link to the current years online valid list, https://www.regattaman.com/cert_list.php, a person or organization has access to basic boat demographic data and a link to the boats actual certificate.    Unlike many other rating systems, the actual certificate form is not a pdf document but an html page.  This makes it much simpler to write a tool to grab and parse (scrape) the data into whatever format is required.  The boat demographic data we supply is limited to information that would otherwise be published on the web in Race Results or Scratch sheet for a regatta.   No other personal data is available (i.e. emails, phone numbers,etc.). We (RMS/ORA) reserve the right to limit the number of times per day that a particular IP address can access this page to prevent unneeded waste of server time.


• Rating Data export:  RMS also provides access to a comma separated file(CSV) download of the ORR-EZ rating data.  This is essentially the same valid list mentioned above in a file format that can be directly imported into another database or spreadsheet with a header row and one row of rating data for each boat in the valid list. There is no fee for this service.  To control access, an organization must register for this option by providing the IP Address that will be accessing the export link.  It is the responsibility of that organization (or their provider) to develop the tools to match the boat demographic data from the CSV file to the data they have on file. We (RMS) have seen first hand how complex this can be in our work with merging various 3rd party rating data into our scoring systems.  It takes a delicate balance of hard matching and soft matching algorithms to get the right mix of accuracy and maximum number of matches.
  If you wish to register for access to the CSV data, use the following link: CSV Data Access Form.
  


• API interface: Like most web service providers RMS has line of Application Programming Interfaces.  One of the functions RMS's API's do today is the uploading of rating data.  It would be relatively simple to adapt this API to a provide a highly robust interface to getting the right rating data for a particular boat. It would work something like this:  The OA's https(SSL secure) server would sent a API request to our https server, exchanging the data between servers in a secure way. There would need to be and a legal agreement between RMS and the OA to not use any of this data for any reason other than matching boats allows the request to include much more data that is in the public viewable Valid Lists(csv or online).  Data fields like email address, phone numbers, street address would be added to the match criteria, providing a much higher likelihood of an accurate match being found.  The API would return the rating data when the match is solid one, but also would return a list of possible "soft" matches if none are found that can be used to narrow the search. This API would be based on current State of the Art standards.  RESTful, versioning, and JSON data.
  The license fee for this service would $50.00 per year for OA's and $250.00 per year for Subcontractors providing services to multiple OA's
  If you have any interest in discussing this in more detail, contact RMS at info@regattaman.com.
  


• A fourth option for you to consider is using RMS scoring tools directly.   We provide a robust set of inexpensive scoring tools in use by 100's of OA's across the country.  Since the ORR-ez database and the Scoring tools database are on the same web server all of the issues associated with downloading and matching boats go away.  For more information on our other product offerings including scoring, please see our FAQ page (https://www.regattaman.com/rms_faq.html)