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Saturday, May 5, 2012

Updates

An update to the database is now available. It contains additions and updates for performance for European and Australia/New Zealand. Almost 300,000 horses have been added and the database is now approaching 1.8 million horses. The next update will feature the North American yearlings of 2012 , foals of 2011, and will be available in mid July.

Updating foreign horses is a challenge to say the least. I have gathered the data from twelve different websites. The data is freely available, unlike the situation in North America where you have to pay for it. Australia has just changed their policy of charging for access and now makes all reports available for free. They have realized that the data is important for breeders to make correct decisions on breeding and also recognize that the old system was not serving the small breeders that make up the greatest percentage of their membership.

I have long been an advocate of free access to pedigree information. After all the breeders pay dearly to create this information in the first place - why should they be charged for using it?

Every breed registry for Standardbreds has a website where they offer information in various formats. One of the best is the aforesaid Australian site. One of the most artistic is the Italian site ANACT and the French have several sites where you can access their pedigrees as well as complete reference material on active sires. In that respect both USTA and Standardbred Canada are sadly lacking. The stallion information is incomplete and many times outdated. It should be a priority for a breed registry to at least get this right.

The European Union has been debating for years how to combine their data into one resource but so far no results. As far as I know the PedigreeGuru website that we operate is the only internet site where you can view pedigrees for any standardbred horse in the world. Surely the various breed registries with all of their resources could replicate what we are able to do basically on a shoestring.

 

 

7 comments:

  1. Where is this update available?

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  2. See the Notes section as follows

    An update to the Globetrotter database is now available - May 5th You can access the instructions and the database link on our website at http://www.pedigreematching.com Click on the Globetrotter - Products page and scroll down to the links IMPORTANT - If you are in the habit of adding your own horses be sure to make a backup of your old database before replacing with the new one. You can then import the backup file to add your horses back in.

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  3. I just received an update file from a Globetrotter user in Australia that has added over 50,000 horses and put the database over 1.8 million. If you are in the habit of adding in your own horses, especially older historical pedigrees, you can make a backup file and send it to me to include in the database to fill in the blanks for the benifit of all users. The major blanks are for Norwegian, Danish and Finnish standardbreds as well as recent performance for coldbloods in Sweden and Norway.

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  4. Norm - What happens with Globetrotter when a yearling is renamed before it races? Do the earnings and stats ever show up? Thanks, Kathy

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  5. This happens a lot especially with US horses where the cost to change a name is cheap. In Canada it costs $115 to change a name which is a deterrent. I usually wait until the yearlings race and they show up in the database under their new name, then I have to clean the previous name out of the database. Its a long process, one at a time, and some are missed and will show up in the sale pedigrees generated by Globetrotter. If you spot a duplicate you can delete it yourself and send me a note so I can remove it also.

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  6. Our mare Make Some Noise has a 2009 colt named Red Star Noisey who is now called Thunder Noise. Thanks, Kathy

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