The OpenClimb Ladder format
Every climb on this site publishes its measurements as an OCL document — a JSON format with one defining rule: a maximum gradient cannot be expressed without its measurement distance. The schema forbids windowless maxima. That is the whole point: “32%” is unfalsifiable; “32% over 2 m, 27% over 25 m” is a measurement.
An OCL document carries the ladder (maxima over explicit windows: 2 and 3 m diagnostic, 5–100 m standard), the quality annotations you see on these pages (≈ canopy caveats, excluded artifact zones with raw values preserved), an overall measurement confidence letter — how much trust to place in the numbers, deliberately not called a “grade” or “category” since in cycling both mean the gradient itself (A: fine source, clean standard windows · B: minor interventions · C: coarser source or unresolved windows · D: coarse fallback · U: awaiting human review — rankings default to A/B), external claims kept strictly separate from measurements — each with its evidence type and, where relevant, how the observation reached us — and full provenance down to the LiDAR tile ids.
The spec and normative JSON Schema are public, versioned 0.1.0-draft and open for comment: specification · schema · comment.
Live documents: every climb page links its own OCL JSON (e.g. cefn-llan.json), and the whole catalogue is summarized in climbs.csv.