I wanted to start a separate thread, so as to not keep hijacking the other.

YBTracking (formerly YellowBrick) also makes their data available through an XML feed. The documentation around it is located at: http://cdn.yb.tl/docs/Yellowbrick%20XML%20API%20Notes.pdf

I pulled a portion of the N2B 2016 data as an example. This particular subset is from Triage, on which I raced this year. It is not the full dataset returned, as that would be for all of the boats. The complete URL string was: http://live.adventuretracking.com/xml/nb2016?n=5

For any given race, you replace "nb2016" with the race's short code. The n value identifies how many updates back you would like to pull. In this example, I pulled the last 5 updates from the tracker.

<Device serial="5883" name="Triage" marker="165">
   <Position alert="false">
      <GpsAt>2016-06-22T15:00:05Z</GpsAt>
      <Latitude>32.29079</Latitude>
      <Longitude>-64.78717</Longitude>
      <Altitude>26.0</Altitude>
      <SOG>1.4</SOG>
      <COG>082</COG>
      <Battery>86</Battery>
      <ID>25421501</ID>
      <Temperature>29.0</Temperature>
   </Position>
   <Position alert="false">
      <GpsAt>2016-06-22T14:30:00Z</GpsAt>
      <Latitude>32.28920</Latitude>
      <Longitude>-64.80078</Longitude>
      <Altitude>30.0</Altitude>
      <SOG>4.1</SOG>
      <COG>134</COG>
      <Battery>86</Battery>
      <ID>25417427</ID>
      <Temperature>29.0</Temperature>
   </Position>
   <Position alert="false">
      <GpsAt>2016-06-22T14:00:00Z</GpsAt>
      <Latitude>32.31329</Latitude>
      <Longitude>-64.83002</Longitude>
      <Altitude>5.0</Altitude>
      <SOG>4.7</SOG>
      <COG>263</COG>
      <Battery>86</Battery>
      <ID>25412605</ID>
      <Temperature>29.0</Temperature>
   </Position>
   <Position alert="false">
      <GpsAt>2016-06-22T13:30:00Z</GpsAt>
      <Latitude>32.31781</Latitude>
      <Longitude>-64.78441</Longitude>
      <Altitude>15.0</Altitude>
      <SOG>4.1</SOG>
      <COG>228</COG>
      <Battery>86</Battery>
      <ID>25408528</ID>
      <Temperature>29.0</Temperature>
   </Position>
   <Position alert="false">
      <GpsAt>2016-06-22T13:00:36Z</GpsAt>
      <Latitude>32.34010</Latitude>
      <Longitude>-64.75505</Longitude>
      <Altitude>9.0</Altitude>
      <SOG>4.7</SOG>
      <COG>223</COG>
      <Battery>86</Battery>
      <ID>25404915</ID>
      <Temperature>29.0</Temperature>
   </Position>
</Device>

I found the data valuable, as it has the Lat/Lon at the time of the update, as well as the SOG and COG, at the time of the report. This lets you see not only the snapshot speed and direction, but also let's you pull averages over multiple reporting periods. I also use this for rebuilding race schedules for portions of races, for which I may not have gotten all of the race schedules.

Most modern languages have tools for parsing XML data, and the YB API makes it easy by bringing all of the data for a single boat under the <Device> tag, with each report being grouped in the <Position> tags.

Just thought I would put this out there for discussion, since it came up in another thread.