SciolyFF (Science Olympiad File Format)

We propose a standardized file format called SciolyFF to represent Science Olympiad tournament results. This will allow for a more universal record of tournament performance and also make it easier to do sabermetric-like stats and other fun stuff. The format is a subset of YAML for easy implementation of parsers across many programming languages.

A website that generates results tables based off SciolyFF files can be found here and the source code for the website here.

Reading through the demo file here is probably the fastest way to get acquainted with the format. Officially, any file that passes the validation (see Usage -- Validation) is valid, but the intentions of the format outlined in the comments of the demo file should be respected.

gem install sciolyff

This gem is currently in an alpha stage. To get the latest changes before official releases, build from source:

git clone https://github.com/unosmium/sciolyff.git && cd sciolyff
gem build sciolyff.gemspec
gem install ./sciolyff-0.12.0.gem

A Ruby gem provided in this repository contains a command line utility that can validate if a given file meets the SciolyFF. The files found in lib/sciolyff/validator also serve as the specification for the format.

From the command line, e.g.

sciolyff 2017-05-20_nationals_c.yaml

Inside Ruby code, e.g.

require 'sciolyff'

validator = SciolyFF::Validator.new
puts validator.valid? File.read('2017-05-20_nationals_c.yaml') #=> true
print validator.last_log #=> error or warning messages

Although the SciolyFF makes the results file human-readable without the ambiguity of spreadsheet results, it can be a bit awkward to parse overall results -- for instance, when trying to regenerate a results spreadsheet from a SciolyFF file.

To make this easier, a SciolyFF::Interpreter class has been provided to wrap the output of Ruby's yaml parser. For example:

require 'sciolyff'

i = SciolyFF::Interpreter.new(File.read('2017-05-20_nationals_c.yaml'))

a_and_p = i.events.find { |e| e.name == 'Anatomy and Physiology' }
a_and_p.trialed? #=> false

team_one = i.teams.find { |t| t.number == 1 }
team_one.placing_for(a_and_p).points #=> 7
team_one.points #=> 448

# sorted by rank
i.teams #=> [#<...{:school=>"Troy H.S.", :number=>3, :state=>"CA"}>, ... ]

A fuller example can be found here in the code for the Unosmium Results website, found here. There is also of course the documentation, a bit sparse currently.