Who would I talk to about the results database? I'd want to look at the schema, then I would give you an SQL query to run.
What I want to get is a list of swimmers who competed in both the 1 hr postal and swam the 100 yd. free, their age, gender, and times.
I'd prefer this to writing a screen-scraping program to harvest the data from the USMS website.
Dave, not sure what data mining analysis you have in mind, but it sounds interesting. It would be kind of fun to come up with some kind of "all around freestyle" ranking. Usually you have your drop dead sprinters on one end, and your never say die distance people on the other end. But what about those of us who are sort of evenly mediocre at all distances?
Since freestyle has the most number of "in the pool" events, maybe we could come up with a freestyle decathalon event where you can score points (say, the inverse of the Top 25 in each event--where no. 1 gets 25 points, and no. 25 gets 1 point), add all these up, and get the cumulative score.
50
100
200
500
1000
1650
half hour swim
hour swim
5k
10k
I think all of the above, with the possible exception of the half hour swim, are now official USMS events. You could argue that the 50, 100, and 200 are sprint-ish events; the 500, 1000, and 1650 (and possibly the half hour swim) are middle-ish or shortish distance events; and the rest are actual distance events.
Dave, not sure what data mining analysis you have in mind, but it sounds interesting. It would be kind of fun to come up with some kind of "all around freestyle" ranking. Usually you have your drop dead sprinters on one end, and your never say die distance people on the other end. But what about those of us who are sort of evenly mediocre at all distances?
Since freestyle has the most number of "in the pool" events, maybe we could come up with a freestyle decathalon event where you can score points (say, the inverse of the Top 25 in each event--where no. 1 gets 25 points, and no. 25 gets 1 point), add all these up, and get the cumulative score.
50
100
200
500
1000
1650
half hour swim
hour swim
5k
10k
I think all of the above, with the possible exception of the half hour swim, are now official USMS events. You could argue that the 50, 100, and 200 are sprint-ish events; the 500, 1000, and 1650 (and possibly the half hour swim) are middle-ish or shortish distance events; and the rest are actual distance events.
