I like it and I second AZ!
I used to do Sprint Series scoring back in 2007. If these standards were available back then and used by local clubs it would have made my task sooooooo much easier. 90-95% of effort was spent of re-entering data in the system I developed. But it would have only worked as long as clubs provided results in XML format.
Just to demonstrate how easy it could make data exchange between systems and if you have Excel 2007 available try following steps:
- Open Excel
- Click in Ribbon and clock on 'Open' to open file dialog box
- Cut-and-past following URL into 'File Name' dialog box (it's sample data from IOF website) -
http://orienteering.org/datastandard/3.0/StartList...
- Click on Open
- Select 'As an XML Table' when 'Open XML' appears
- Click 'OK' on next dialog box
There is more to it but point of exercise above is that once data are in available in standardized format it's piece of cake to develop import procedures and it does not matter what system was used to create data.