Is this the first open data Olympics?

It should be - we have access to better data analysis and visualisation tools than ever before, many of them free. There is also a culture of open data around the world that just wasn't there in 2008. Governments have thrown open the doors to their data vaults and numbers are everywhere.

And what is open data? It is data published as a spreadsheet or a csv or some other machine-readable format which allows analysts to do something with it. It's what our Free our Data campaign called for.

Open data has won the big argument, arguably ever since the McKinsey report in May last year which pointed out that open data means money for those who can build apps and services off the back of it. And with it has come the rise in data journalism - the art/craft/slog of getting stories out of numbers.

And these Olympics are a gift for Data journalism. Every day brings us a story that cries out for analysis - and if you're interested you can find a lot of the stuff we have done here, including:

• If Michael Phelps were a country, how big would he be?

Bigger than India, it turns out, if you use the International Olympics Committee ranking of medals which puts gold above silver and silver above bronze

• How good was Yi Shiwen's performance really?

Visualising how China's swimmer's record has improved over time

• Who would top the alternative medal table if you ranked by GDP or population instead of just medals?

We worked with a team of statisticians from imperial college to rank each country

And our own interactive team also made this rather lovely retro Olympic race game which doubles as a dataviz plus the Second Screen, which combines data and content.

This is happening around the web - not least the excellent BBC guide, Your Olympic body match or the New York Times results page, the Telegraph's Olympic viz blog - or this live medal counter from FranceInfo. The ever-fantastic La Nacion data blog in Argentina took our Olympic medal winner data and turned it into a Spanish-language interactive.

This competition run by visualising.org shows the wealth of talent creating data visualisations on the web around the Games.

A lot of these are small data projects which we can easily update as the games go on. They're certainly not big data projects requiring weeks of development time; but rather quick hits which we can fit around the news agenda.

But how open has the data been around these Olympic games? At the beginning of the Games, we asked the International Olympic Committee if they would be providing results data in an open format. This was the response:

Can you please clarify what you mean by "open data"?

And that's not to say that we haven't had any raw data from the IOC - this list of every medal won at an Olympic games, is a real example of the kind of historica data we've had access to. And we also got the full list of team GB athletes from London 2012 as a spreadsheet, which must be the first time that has happened. It's interesting data and it allows all sorts of analysis - of the kind that allows Ben Willer's to make this stunning visualisation of every gold medal in Olympic history.

But is that the key data we need? I think there are two obvious datasets which you want published in an open data format: the full list of athletes and the live results.

The first should have been simple: every athlete coming to London for the Games is registered by London 2012 and their details published on this website. It's deliberately set up to be almost impossible to scrape, even for our own pretty experienced team. But the data it records is really useful: age, sex, event, height and weight. It allows us to look at which kinds of athletes are coming from where - what sex they are and which events they are competing in.

We asked London 2012 for the data - and we were told it did not exist as a spreadsheet, which seems unlikely, but that we were free to cut and paste it from the official press site. So that's what we did - and you can see the results here. That's not exactly open data - although we have made it so.

Olympic athletes full list. Click image to explore it

As for live results, it may be broadcast in front of your eyes but reusing and reproducing it is a no-go, largely because it still costs money to get the data in the first place. We have a live feed from the New York Times at the Guardian, for instance - and republishing that as downloadable data is explicitly forbidden. The BBC similarly has a live feed - and you can get results from London 2012 too. But not as live open data.

We will be opening up some detailed Olympic results soon - although not the ones we get from the NYT.

In some ways, the interesting stuff is actually taking place outside anyway - the way Emoto is analysing Twitter sentiment, for instance, is revolutionary and will change the way we see the games.

Emoto - click image to explore it

Will that be the case at Rio in 2016? The economics mean it probably will be. But is it sustainable?

We have seen how hackers have reclaimed elections around the world, opening up the data for everyone to use.

At the end of July, as the Games got underway, developers took part in the first Olympic hackday - and you can see the results here. It's hard to see that by 2016 this won't emerge as data we can all use.

So, is it the first Open data Olympics? Not this time.

But it is the first data Olympics.

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