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How is the data organized?
This page contains information about the underlying data structures used within The Racing System. For many people, this technical discussion might be more than they want to know. But we think it'll help you use the tool better if you understand more about what we are trying to do.
The following terms will be explained:
A race meeting consists of as many events as you wish (e.g. Downhill and Cross Country) and each event can consists of multiple races (e.g. Karapoti Classic and Karapoti Challenge). With the flexibility and intrinsic checks and balances provided with The Racing System, you can produce your race results quickly and accurately.
We agree that these terms sound kind of similar, but we needed something that followed a hierarchy in order to accommodate the more complex circumstances. Hopefully, everything will be cleared up with the following few paragraphs.
Meeting
The meeting is the basic unit which collects everything together. A meeting might have one race, or twenty. A good analogy is a track and field competition; here you have many different events all going on at more or less the same venue. For mountain biking, a meeting might consist of a downhill and a cross country event. For example, Karapoti Classic and the Cactus Cup would each be a separate meeting.
You could think of a meeting as something for which you have to find a location, organize access, arrange parking, and a produce a map so the crowds can get there.
Event
An event is perhaps a misnomer. But we haven't found any better way to break down a meeting. In mountain biking, the various events at a meeting might be Dual Slalom, Cross Country, and Downhill.
The reason we created events was to allow two different races to be run at the same time but still have some way to tell what race a given racer was competing in. For example, you might run the Karapoti Challenge and the Karapoti Classic. Each race would have different classes and started at slightly different times, but would have a common finishing line. Racers from each race would be finishing at the same time.
Race
The race is what it's all about! It's what the customers are there for and it's what The Racing System produces results for. Each race belongs to a given event which in turn belongs to a meeting.
Class
Almost all racers compete within a given class (e.g. Elite Men).
Each class is based upon three components:
You've probably heard of the class Senior Expert Men. This class consists of an Age Group (Senior), a Racer Category (Expert) and a Gender group. You can name the class whatever you like, but The Racing System will try and give you it's best guess as to what it should be based on the components mentioned above.
Gender
Well, there shouldn't be any surprises here. Convention has it that we tend to break the racers up so that men are competing against men and women against women.
Orders
At just about every race around here we see t-shirts for sale. That's the basic item. But lately, we've been seeing more and more things being sold by the organizers. Things like:
- Pasta party tickets
- Transport to and from the venue
- Post-race party
- Pancake breakfast
The order sub-system allows you to specify what you want to sell and how much it is. For every item, you can specify an optional range of sizes or colors.
Racer Category
The category of a rider is a close parallel to the ability of the rider. Typical categories are:
- Novice
- Recreational
- Expert
- Elite
Age Group
The age group of a rider is usually based on the rider's age. But often we see riders competing in a lower age group. Examples of age groups are:
- Junior
- Senior
- Master
- Open
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This page last updated: Thursday, 02 March 2000 |