By Rex Powell
Interbull has decided to provide an early, confidential release of the international evaluation results. This will give individual countries more time to process the results and check for possible problems before general release. In addition, it will give each country more time to prepare for the official domestic release of evaluations on Monday morning. This allows USDA to target release of the official file for 7:00 a.m. on Monday, five hours earlier than the previous target time of noon.
The change to the Interbull distribution schedule will allow the domestic and Interbull evaluations to be available at the same time. We are projecting a Friday afternoon availability for download of all format 38 files, encrypted with the password available at 7:00 Eastern time Monday morning. The schedule for availability of the format 105 cow evaluation file will be unchanged. We will likely make the bull files available as soon on Friday afternoon as the files are prepared and we feel confident that they are correct. As this will be a new procedure for Interbull and AIPL, the exact timing of bull file availability cannot be better predicted. If a later correction is necessary, we would notify those individuals subscribed to the AIPL evaluation listserver to download the file(s) again. The password made available Monday morning would only allow access to the corrected files.
Beginning with the August 2002 evaluations, Interbull will also have a new time schedule for receiving data, requiring that data be provided to them three days sooner. AIPL has decided to keep the same deadline for receipt of pedigree and production data, however the deadline for type data for breeds other than Holstein has been moved one week earlier, to the same date that pedigree and production data are due. Processing time for yield evaluations by AIPL has been reduced by three days.
Please see the evaluation run schedule for exact dates and the complete time-line for data exchange.
By Rex Powell, George Wiggans, and Ashley Sanders
Adapting to these changes has led us to consider what files will be needed by the industry under the new schedule. We have had some valuable industry input regarding the plan below and will evaluate further comments to see if adjustments need to be made. For example, a format 38 file with all of the official evaluations has been requested. Previously, users needed to combine format 031 files with data from the format 38 files to create a file with complete information on all officially evaluated bulls.
Daughter information fields in the 38 format are based only on US daughters, regardless of whether an Interbull or US-only evaluation is official. These fields will be blank for bulls with fewer than 10 US daughters. The percent US daughters (bytes 479-481) can be used as an indication of how representative these data are. In the format 38 reference, these fields are associated with reference code 145.
We plan to make the following changes to files and formats beginning with the August, 2002 evaluations:
Format 38 was modified to contain the number of countries in the evaluation in positions 413-414 and the 3-letter code for the country with the most daughters in positions 415-417. For bulls with no domestic evaluation some fields will remain blank. For more information please see the format 38 reference.
The evaluations included in the available format 38 files are summarized in the following tables. Test files containing data from the may run may be downloaded without a password (click on the file name to download the compressed file).
| Official Bull Evaluation Files | |||
| File Name1 | No. of records | Zipped file size | Bulls Included |
| 38alloff | 222,000 | 24 MB | All domestic and foreign bulls with official evaluations |
| 38coff | 46,000 | 4.6 MB | All bulls except Holsteins and Red & White |
| 38off | 155,000 | 20 MB | Bulls with US daughters or enrolled with NAAB |
| 38ai | 54,000 | 7.3 MB | All bulls enrolled with NAAB |
| 38s | 3,700 | 557 KB | Bulls enrolled with NAAB, likely to have semen available |
| Non-Official Bull Evaluation Files2 | |||
| File Name1 | No. of records | Zipped file size | Evaluations Included |
| 38usnoff | 3,300 | 504 KB | US-only evaluations for bulls with official Interbull evaluations |
| 38ibnoff | 18,000 | 1.2 MB | Interbull evaluations for bulls with official US-only evaluations |
1Compressed (zipped) files have .zip extension. Uncompressed files have the extension .myy where m is the month (Nov=B) and yy the year of the evaluation (e.g. B02 indicates November, 2002).
2For bulls with both a US-only and an Interbull evaluation available, the Interbull evaluation is official if it includes data from an additional country or if Interbull excludes US data but has higher reliability than the US-only evaluation.