Olympics Data Feeds – Scribbled Notes

This is so much a blog post as a dumping ground for bits and pieces relating to Olympics data coverage…

BBC Internet blog: Olympic Data Services and the Interactive Video Player – has a brief overview of how the BBC gets its data from LOCOG; and Building the Olympic Data Services describes something of the technical architecture.

ODF Data Dictionaries eg ODF Equestrian Data Dictionary [via @alisonw] – describes how lots of data that isn’t available to mortals is published ;-)

Computer Weekly report from Sept 2011: Olympic software engineers enter final leg of marathon IT development project

Examples of some of the Olympics related products you can buy from the Press Association: Press Association: Olympics Graphics (they also do a line of widgets…;-)

I haven’t found a public source of press releases detailing results that has been published as such (seems like you need to register to get them?) but there are some around if you go digging (for example, gymnastics results, or more generally, try a recent websearch for something like this: "report created" site:london2012.olympics.com.au filetype:pdf olympics results).

A search for medallists on Freebase (via @mhawksey), and an example of how to query for just the gold medal winners.

[PDFs detailing biographical details of entrants to track and field events at lease: games XXX olympiad biographical inurl:www.iaaf.org/mm/Document/ filetype:pdf]

A really elegant single web page app from @gabrieldance: Was an Olympic Record Set Today? Great use of the data…:-)

This also makes sense – Journalism.co.uk story on how Telegraph builds Olympics graphics tool for its reporters to make it easy to generate graphical views over event results.

PS though it’s not data related at all, you may find this amusing: OU app for working out which Olympic sport you should try out… Olympisize Me (not sure how you know it was an OU app from the landing page though, other than by reading the URL…?)

PPS I tweeted this, but figure it’s also worth a mention here: isn’t it a shame that LOCOG haven’t got into the #opendata thing with the sports results…