OpenTrack Community Group Launch [via OpenTrack Community Group]

Athletics is maybe the most global sport, being the flagship events of the
Olympic games in terms of both participation and popularity. Due to this
universal interest, information about these events — athletes’ bio and
performance, timing, competition, venues, etc. — is considered as of great
value for an international audience. Statisticians and journalists find it
immensely useful.
In addition to professional athletics, amateur running competitions are
increasing year after year with a direct, multi-billion impact on the markets.
In this case, where business is between private corporations and runners, there
is a similar competition process (registration, timing, results) but there are
no common standards to represent and share the information among stakeholders.
Most of these companies collect and manage information in their systems without
any potential integration with external systems. Thus, open standards in the
amateur running industry would enable opportunities, such as international
partnerships, to enhance the services for runners (athletic history, complex
reporting, social network integration, etc.) and new business models behind this
trend-setting pastime.
This kind of information, published (and reused) as open data, could bring us
opportunities in terms of business and new services to organizers
and supporters.  Most of this information is non-sensitive and extremely
valuable. Companies such as ReportLab and Tilastopaja have been using
athletics data to create tools and services to process and analyze the
information, so all of this is already a reality.
Now, with the support of European Athletics, we launch this OpenTrack Community
Group in order to evolve the technology in this sport. Within this group
we will discuss standards for representing and sharing athletics information.
The main objective is to define the basic schemas and vocabularies to describe
the world of athletics.
As part of the final specifications we would like to produce, we will have:


  an abstract vocabulary to model athletics competitions;
  specific schemas and taxonomies ready to be used as reference;
  making it compatible with schema.org (or proposing an extension).  

Hard work but good news! We won't start from scratch. Reportlab has already
defined a first approach to represent results (see a sample of results in Rio
2016 as JSON), also tools to manage this information.

If you are either a sports or open data enthusiast, join the group and take
part in our discussions to create this specification that hopefully will become
standard. We are defining the charter and scope of works so now it's time to
join us!



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'OpenTrack Community Group Launch'

https://www.w3.org/community/opentrack/2017/03/29/opentrack-community-group-launch/



Learn more about the OpenTrack Community Group: 

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

Received on Wednesday, 29 March 2017 15:35:04 UTC