European Go Database

Last update:October 13th, 2010

What is EGD?

EGD is a project aiming to make available to the European Go community an easily browsable database containing data from all tournaments played in Europe.

The data source

( This section has been completely rewritten after April 3rd, 2009, when the datafeed of EGD changed. Until then, EGD data were updated once a month taking their input from the tables maintained by Ales Cieply. )

Tournaments results are posted to EGD directly by tournaments directors. Indeed EGD has a backend section, EGD-Admin, where everybody involved in tournaments organization for clubs and countries can apply for an user account.
After sign-on, these users can post their data to a temporary storage area. The EGD admins, as soon as possible, check the correctness of these submissions and then validate them for insertion into the main database.
Therefore all data, including the players rating progression, are updated in real-time.

In order to preserve the compatibility with data tables provided by the old EGF ratings website, EGD has also a download section which provides the main tables in the old format:

• Alleuro_lp.html: the players master file (only European players)
• Allworld_lp.html: the players master file (worldwide players)
• All.hst: the history of every player’s attendances at tournaments
• All the national rating ladders.

Of course, all of us involved in EGD pay as much attention as we can on providing a reliable tool, but we cannot grant that data contain no mistakes.
Therefore, those who will detect mistakes or lacks are kindly invited to report them to egd@europeangodatabase.eu.

Technology

EGD relies on the technology Apache + MySQL + PHP; at the moment it is hosted on a Virtual Private Server of Aruba.

In the future, we will evaluate the possibility of mirroring EGD (if anybody has reliable servers available, and wants to mirror EGD, please let us know).

Our idea is to make the project “Free Software” and to make the source code publicly available.
As far as we know, several Go organizations all around the world have taken inspiration from EGD for their own databases; as a noticeable example, the American Go Association has asked our source code and our help for building its own database, which has been released in 2010.

Road Map

EGD is under development. In particular, we would like to follow three main development paths:

- Allow validation and upload of tournament data Done !

- Improve the player’s card management, allowing editing of the contents over the web or by mass importing

- Improve statistical reports. Done !

Since EGD is a product designed for the European Go community, we expect some feedback from the community itself, in terms of criticisms, bug tracking, suggestions for improvements. We strongly invite everybody who has any ideas about improving EGD to let us know.

The Road Map will take care of this feedback.

Acknowledgements

EGD could not exist without the huge efforts made by Ales Cieply in collecting and organizing tournaments data, starting from 1996. So we would like to thank him very much, also for his great kindness every time that we needed to ask him anything.
EGD is a project designed and realized by AGI (Associazione Goistica Italiana).

The biggest contribute to the EGD development has been given by Paolo Scattini for the frontend, and by Aldo Podavini for the backend.

The main part of the statistical reports has been developed by Ronald Van Uffelen.