Introducing the Open Active Community Group [via OpenActive Community Group]

Welcome to the OpenActive Community Group! This post provides a short
introduction to the group, covering its scope, initial roadmap and some notes on
how to get involved.

Supported by Sport England, the Open Data Institute is collaborating with the
sports sector to help activity providers produce openly available data on what,
where and when physical activity sessions are happening. This data, which
won’t include any personal information, will be open for anyone to access, use
and share.

By making more data available, in consistent ease to use formats, we can support
the creation of a new range of products and services. Ultimately we want more
people to be more active.

To achieve this we need to create open specifications that describe how to
publish and share data for reuse in the sector. We will be using this community
group to co-ordinate that activity.
Why use a W3C community group?
Community groups are designed to promote innovation and allow anyone to
contribute to the development of community specifications.

A W3C community group is the ideal place to co-ordinate this type of activity
which benefits from an open, neutral environment that can bring together people
from across a sector.

Community groups are open to everyone; are easy to start; and are supported by
W3c collaboration tools. The W3C also provide a contributor agreement which is
signed by all participants, ensuring that the outputs of the group
remain open.

Please join the group to share your views. You will need to create a free W3C
account in order to sign up, but you don't need to be a member of the W3C to
participate.

All of the detailed discussion and decisions will take place through the
OpenActive mailing list. This gives everyone the opportunity to share their
views and a public record of key decisions. This is an important aspect of
building open standards.

We also plan to hold regular community hangouts to facilitate discussion and
feedback. These will be advertised on the list and will also be open to
everyone. We'll also post status updates and news on the technical work on this
blog.
What is the scope of the group's activities?
In order to publish and share physical activity data we need to:

  Specify how to describe activities by agreeing on a basic model for events and
how to describe them
  Define how to publish data for others to reuse, e.g. via APIs, standard data
formats and mark-up embedded in web pages
  And, eventually, how to book activities so that people can sign-up to the
events they're interested in

The sports activity sector is very diverse. Data is held in large scale leisure
management systems and also shared via individual websites, meetup groups, etc.
We need to be working towards supporting the breadth of that community.

The specifications we create will build as far as possible on existing standards
and technologies, e.g. Schema.org, etc.
What are our initial plans?
While some work has already gone into exploring how to publish activity data
via an API, the group will initially focus on how to describe activities.

This will involve:

  some investigation into existing standards and how they might support our
goals
  defining some use cases that capture the variety of ways in which activities
are described
  agreeing a basic data model for activities, e.g. drawing on Schema.org
  describing how to publish data to this model, e.g. as part of the paged data
exchange specification or as embedded markup
  identifying some existing controlled vocabularies, e.g. lists of activities
and ways to classify events (by age, fitness level, etc) that are already used
in the sector
  encouraging publishers and developers to share and use data in these formats
to help validate the work

We aim to do this through an iterative, inclusive approach that will give as
many organisations as possible an opportunity to contribute.
How can you get involved?
If you'd like to get involved, here's some initial steps:

  Sign up to the group
  Send an email to introduce yourself on the mailing list
  Complete the Doodle poll and join our first community hangout in December
  Share pointers to other relevant work on the mailing list, this might be
existing datasets, example data, APIs or controlled vocabularies that are
relevant to our initial roadmap
  Provide feedback on our initial research and in particular, complete this
survey to help us to learn more about how you structure data on activities
and sessions
  Share this post with your colleagues or others who you think should be
involved.

And, if you're interested in other ways in which your organisation can get
involved, then take a look at the OpenActive website and fill in the contact
form.

Looking forward to working with you all!



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This post sent on OpenActive Community Group



'Introducing the Open Active Community Group'

https://www.w3.org/community/openactive/2016/11/21/introducing-the-open-active-community-group/



Learn more about the OpenActive Community Group: 

https://www.w3.org/community/openactive

Received on Monday, 21 November 2016 16:32:57 UTC