SDIF
US Swimming has published a specification for transferring swimming data between
organizations and computer programs, a Standard Data Interchange Format (SDIF). Tasks include: publishing meet results, sending
a variety of information back and forth between USS and the LSCs (registration
information, top 16 times, etc), etc. The latest version I'm aware of is
3.0. The primary push for the latest version
came from the alteration of how swimmers are ID'd. The USS # for each swimmer is now
MMDDYYFFFMLLLL where MMDDYY is their birthdate (and yes, it is NOT Y2K compliant), and
FFFMLLLL are the first 3 letters of their first name, their middle initial, and the last 4
letters of their last name. Letters that are not filled in this fashion are replaced
with asterisks.
Meets should publish their results in SDIF format. It is a VERY un-compact
format, however, it ZIPs wonderfully well and has the (intended, I'm sure) advantage of
being readable as is (not very easily, however). SDIF Master makes extracting data
from these files quick and easy, whether pulling individual or team results.
Go to SDIF_PRO
, a Swim Data utility that will allow you to extract all the information
you want from these files.