Background Among orienteers we have a common wish to benefit from using the latest technology. A clear indication of this is the number of computer systems we use when we organise orienteering events. It can be quite an undertaking to make all these systems cooperate, and often much hard work is put in at events to ensure safe and reliable transfer of information from one computer system to another. The internet is here and it provides even further opportunities and challenges. We have come to expect that event information and results are posted on the world wide web.
Some events already accept entries on-line from their web page.
Even more new systems are in sight on the horizon, such as web casting systems that can publish results, and position monitoring systems that can publish competitors positions in the forest, both of these in real time. All this leads to the conclusion that there is a need for a simple means to enable all these disparate systems to communicate information in a reliable manner. A group of experts from national federations and orienteering systems vendors met in Oslo, Norway, in October 1998, and laid the foundation for the work, and agreed on the principles. However, Information Technology people tend to be very busy. Therefore, the envisaged time schedule for the project proved too ambitious.