RE: 2014 Sports Proposal - V3

Dear List,



This is an "old" thread, but I am adding some information.



Discipline:

If you go to the website of the International Ski Federation (http://www.fis-ski.com/), you will see that they are defining cross-country, ski jumping, Nordic Combined, Alpine skiing, Freestyle skiing and Snowboard as disciplines.

So according to them, the sport is skiing, and the disciplines are the different ... disciplines.



Same goes with swimming, where breast stroke would be a discipline.



Olympic sports:

Remember that there are differences when it comes to the Olympic Games. A sport can be defined as a Olympic Sport, but not be on the Olympic Program.

An example:

Chess is defined as an Olympic Sport (http://www.olympic.org/chess), but you will not (at least not at the moment) see any chess competitions in neither Olympic Summer Games nor Olympic Winter Games.

Since I am in contact with the IOC from time to time, I have asked them of a list of sports currently defined as Olympic Sports and which one of these are on the Program.



Team sport:

There will always be a team of people around one or more athletes, but I believe most people would define soccer, baseball, rugby and so on as team sports.

However: When it comes to modeling some sports in computer systems, it is normal to define tennis as a team sport because you have the "home" and "away" construction. Even though most people would consider tennis as a single sport (except when it comes to doubles...) I am therefor in favor of awayCompetitor rather than homeTeam - even though home/awayTeam is more common - and shorter.



Home team /away team: When a team is playing on their home turf / venue, they are the home team. However there are tournaments, like the just recently finished World Cup, where one team is defined Home Team and the other is defined Away team. The team starting the game/match/event - in soccer the home team has the kick off in the first period -  is defined as Home Team.

I think a good definition of a home team is the team starting the event.



Professional Sports: Wikipedia has a quite good definition on professional sports: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professional_sports - in short: Professional sports, as opposed to amateur sports, are sports in which athletes receive payment for their performance.



Definitions to other professional sports/leagues and so on, are linked in the article.



One thing I think is important to have in mind: Even though you can model sports, information about sport/sport event/sport organization and so on with generic terms. I think it would be a good idea to come to a mutual ground on what is a default sport scheme, then you will have differences.

Like the example Tom brought up with Rugby and the leagues. I am not sure if that qualifies as disciplines, but rather league types? Or? What does the Rugby Union / IRB say?



Best

Trond Husø

Norsk Telegrambyrå (NTB)