AthTech’21 to continue in this Community Group

Hi all,

As announced in the last post [1], the fourth edition of AthTech was held last week. This year's conference, organized by European Athletics, OpenTrack, TrackMeetings.info, and the support of Word Athletics and the University of Zadar, gathered over 70 European experts in technology and sports, including athletics federations, services providers, sports statisticians, and data interoperability enthusiasts.  

The three-day event included presentations of use cases, technical discussions, dedicated workshops, and service/product demos. The event was opened by European Athletics and World Athletics, the top governing bodies that rule this sport. An Dang Duy (CIO, World Athletics) presented appealing services for community engagement and the World Athletics' digital roadmap, heading towards a global competition calendar with homogeneous competition results based on automatic protocols.  

Christian Milz (CEO at European Athletics) and Nicolas Launois (Head of Digital and Data at European Athletics) presented the strategy of the European federation, emphasizing their commitment to digital transformation and their vision of having "Athletics in every home and on every device". Events and high performance are still in the roadmap, but now they are also focused on the potential growth of the community based on data and customized engagement opportunities. 

Standards and common formats were the most repeated terms during the conference sessions. 

Entering into the details, both European Athletics and World Athletics agree on having aligned calendars, statistics, and data interoperability among the so fragmented athletics databases worldwide. Also, many of the speakers emphasized the need for these common formats and databases to play a global sport, including:
- Competition calendar, including location, program, disciplines, and levels of the competition (national, international, specific licenses...);
- Results for statistical purposes (records, performances, etc.) and in close-to-real-time for fan engagement;
- Description of sports facilities beyond the location (i.e., technical features of a track, sensors included in the fields, ...);
- World rankings;
- Unique IDs (and mappings) to identify athletes;
- Standard taxonomies to identify event codes, categories, type of events, type of records,...

The event concluded with a dedicated workshop discussing needs and opportunities for data exchange in databases calendars, results, and athlete's performances management, to be ruled by the top federations. Before closing the event, all the participants agreed to keep the conversations under this Community Group and hold periodic follow-up meetings starting in November 2nd (10:00 CET) [3]. Save the date or just subscribe to the calendar of the community group [4].

It is not easy to standardize these aspects and apply them to the current systems, where thousands of member federations and event organizers use their own solutions. Still, the attendees' consensus and the World Athletics and European Athletics' alignment have brought some light to this challenge. 

Please send your suggestions about your interests and needs so we will be able to include them in the next call.

Best regards,

Martin

[1] https://www.w3.org/community/opentrack/2021/09/01/standards-in-athtech-2021/
[2] http://athtech.run/2021/ 
[3] https://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/meetingdetails.html?year=2021&month=11&day=2&hour=9&min=0&sec=0&p1=136&p2=48&p3=101 
[4] https://www.w3.org/groups/cg/opentrack/calendar 

Martin Alvarez-Espinar
HUAWEI TECHNOLOGIES CO.,LTD.
European Research Institute
Huawei Technologies R&D Belgium NV
Gaston Geenslaan 10, 3001 Heverlee, Belgium
E-mail : martin.alvarez.espinar@huawei.com  

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Received on Wednesday, 29 September 2021 06:57:00 UTC