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II Annual Athletics Data Conference

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Martin Alvarez-Espinar edited this page Oct 16, 2017 · 3 revisions

Face-to-face meeting at AthTech (http://athtech.run)

Algarve, Portugal 4th October 2017 - 15:00-18:00

Organisers:

About the conference

AthTech is a two-day conference that aims at standardising Athletics competition technical management, with a strong focus on data management. European Athletics is putting efforts on the homogenization of competition data structures, building a common infrastructure that guarantees data interoperability between all stakeholders: regional/national federations, sports clubs, associations, event organisers, media agencies, and the public in general.

This standard infrastructure for Athletics data management will enable a common mechanism to gain effectiveness and efficiency in the process of collecting and sharing data on a global scale. These works follow the open data paradigm, encouraging the publication of data in standard formats and under permissive re-use licences. This will bring us successful services and products —made by federations or by third parties— that will affect the sport in a positive way. We will be able to: federate resources in an automatic way; establish common identifiers for athletes, clubs, and other entities; access better reports; track competition issues, and records; have centralised up-to-date rankings; create and publish live results; create new services and products on top of the data.

Athletics federations, clubs and event organisers are invited to present their experiences on competition management (how information is collected during a competition, how entries are registered, how/where results are published, etc.). The main objective of the conference is to understand the European and global requirements of Athletics management systems to implement a standard to collect, process, publish and share Athletics information (athletes, teams, governing bodies, participation in competitions, results, issues and results, etc.). This event will serve as a discussion forum to search for a common solution built on top of the existing local platforms to share Athletics information in a common way.

Athletics data? What data?

The scope of this conference includes all data regarding Athletics:

  • Persons (athletes, coaches, officials, organisers, etc.);
  • Organisations (governing bodies, teams, clubs, associations, medical organisations, etc.);
  • Events (scheduling, venues, etc.);
  • Competition (entries, start lists, rankings, results, stages, distance/height cards, features, records, etc.);
  • Any other data related to Athletics.

We consider the sport of Athletics as a broad concept, including track and field disciplines and official competitions (cross country, road races, race-walking, mountain races, etc.), but also the rest of amateur and fun competitions (i.e., school games, fun runs, local traditional disciplines).

Discussions will take into account previous efforts to represent sports information: BBC Sports Ontology, IOC ODF, IPTC, and Schema.org. Also the experiences of key players in competition management in terms of Information Technologies. The outcome of the conference will serve to define the final version of the OpenTrack Vocabulary, developed by the W3C OpenTrack Community Group.

Face-to-face Meeting

  • ~20 attendees in the room. Some of them never heard about W3C neither Opentrack.
  • [Intro project (Martin + Andy)]
  • [Status of the OpenTrack works (presentation Martin)]
  • [ReportLab's schemes (presentation Andy)]
  • ["OpenTrack Linked Data" Vs "OpenTrack Lite"]
  • [Countries in Linked Data (Proposal Martin)]
  • [Creation of purl.org/athletics to achieve persistence of URIs]
  • [Taxonomies (definition, repository, etc.)]
  • [Tools needed]
  • [Next steps]

Issues during the meeting:

  • Distance & mass should accept any measurement unit to be universal
  • Categories in youth sports are represented by the year of birth, not age.
  • Result status within the competition is different than the status of competition (to check wording).
  • To add a new descriptive field for Disqualification reasons (i.e., IAAF's Article no.)
  • To add a new Country/Area field for NR.
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