Tin Can: access object information from Articulate story?

I've been working on capturing and tracking Tin Can statements from an Articulate story that I host.  I don't want to use 3rd parties, so I've written my own LRS endpoint, using C# and WCF.  To figure all this out, I went into Fiddler to see what Articulate was publishing and I am now generating, storing, and displaying Tin Can statements based on the content in the request to the statements/ service.  But nowhere do I see the object information (<description lang="und"&gt.  There was another post -

http://community.articulate.com/forums/p/21825/126346.aspx

where the same question was asked, but never answered.  Because I don't have this information, I can't display (and have accurate tracking) for many statements.  I'll get "Joe experienced '6naE42sDsSM'" instead of "Joe experienced 'Results Slide'".  I noticed that when I run the story via SCORM Cloud , they are able to display the object information in their statement viewer, but I never saw this information published by Articulate even when hosted via SCORM Cloud.

I know that sparse=false is the way to get this info via a query, but I don't have the info in the first place.  I do have the tincan.xml file in the same directory where I host the story.  Should I be deserializing the tincan.xml file (via XmlSerializer) and reading the <activity> nodes to pull out this information?  This seems rather inefficient.  Is this the preferred way, or is there something I'm missing here?  Is there a good way to get this object info?

Thanks a lot