So I've written this application for Reed Ayers and John Staples to extract GPS data from Eventing competitions. At this moment, Reed is looking at data extracted by the application to determine speeds on course for horses and riders.
He's been posting what he's found over at : Speed Study Begins to Uncover Interesting Implications Between Long and Short Format
The calculations he's running are pretty complex. And yes, the thread is turning into a "Scientists Smackdown 2008" as one poster put it.
Anyways, the application reads the TCX file from a Garmin Foreman 305 (the TCX files have different xml formats) and flattens the data in the trackpoints for the researchers to see the data on a second by second or nearly that basis.
Figuring out how to get that conversion was a PITA. I did end up traversing the XML attributes and elements. It isn't the most efficient way to accomplish this task. I'll probably go back and jam my head into some XSLT to write an XSLTransform object instead. I believe that will make the transformation easier. Those TCX files are averaging 13Mb and the application is currently a memory and processor hog.