How Organizations Can Access Offshore Racing Assoc. (ORA) Rating Data For Their Racers.

Regatta Management Solutions (RMS), the front end web supplier for Offshore Racing Associations ORR and ORR-Ez racing rules, 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 Organizing Authority (OA) who desires to access the data.  The ORR and ORR-ez Rules 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 lists: (ORR) https://www.regattaman.com/orr_valid_list.php AND (ORR-Ez) 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 and 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 an Application Programming Interface (API) that provides access to various data on our system. One of the functions that the API provides is the downloading of rating data in JSON format. The granularity of the rating data can be adjusted by the parameters sent to the API: from a single boat (certificate) to all boats within a particular rating system (ex. ORR-Ez). Access to the data is by specific key issued to an OA or to a 3rd party and is good for one year. 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)